


Secret Rooms of Hogwarts

by Attila



Category: Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
Genre: Alternate Universe - Hogwarts, Brief appearances from most of the cast, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-28
Updated: 2018-12-28
Packaged: 2019-09-29 02:48:28
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 86,846
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17195075
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Attila/pseuds/Attila
Summary: When Peter Grant is whisked out of unemployment and into a post as Potions Master at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, he expects the teenagers to be the worst things in the castle. It's a pity Lesley May thinks one of the other new professors might be working for the Faceless Man. And as far as she's concerned, the most likely suspect is Defense expert Thomas Nightingale--gorgeous, talented, and a totally sketchy bastard.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [GreenAwesomeness](https://archiveofourown.org/users/GreenAwesomeness/gifts).



> _"Like Harry Potter?"_
> 
> _Nightingale sighed. "No," he said. "Not like Harry Potter."_
> 
> #
> 
> First off, this has not been Brit picked, and I'm American, so if any Brits read it and notice anything glaringly wrong that can be fixed in a minute or less, please do let me know, and I'll make that happen. Thanks!
> 
> Also, a note about SPOILERS: theoretically, this should include none. It is 100% AU. On the other hand, bits and pieces of it are designed to mirror or rhyme with bits and pieces of canon, so it's not outside the realm of possibility that some things in this fic could imply some things about actual canon. On the other hand, there are also definitely bits of this that could give you an idea about actual canon that is, in point of fact, completely incorrect. So overall, read at your own risk! Good luck! Possible themes include anything through Hanging Tree, because that's about what was out when I wrote the first 85% of this fic.
> 
> For those of you completely unfamiliar with canon, congratulations! It shouldn't matter. Happy reading.

I heard the door to the flat open and called out an absent hello, but I still wasn’t expecting it when Lesley came into the main room and slapped me on the head before flopping down into the armchair next to me. She didn’t hit me very hard, which _probably_ meant I hadn’t done anything she was planning real retribution for, and when I jumped and made a face at her, she grinned at me, which was promising.

“Did I deserve that?” I said, because honestly, it was entirely possible I had and just didn’t know it yet.

“Don’t be a baby,” she replied, which meant no. “Anyway, you owe me.”

“I do?”

“Yes,” she said. “I got you a job, so you can finally stop lazing about here like a pathetic loser and avoiding your mum’s calls.”

I opened my mouth to dispute that but stopped when I remembered that I was sitting on the couch in pajamas playing _Legend of Zelda_ and hadn’t talked to my mum in weeks, which was tantamount to suicide in my family. I decided that discretion was the better part of valor.

Unfortunately, Lesley knew me well enough that she followed that train of thought anyway, and then she smirked at me. “Say thank you, Peter.”

“Hang on,” I said. “How did you get me a job? How do I know I even want the job?”

She gave me a Look that somehow started judgmentally with the fact that I was wearing a _Star Wars_ t-shirt and sweats while carefully giving Link an outfit that had absolutely no in-game benefits but looked _really_ cool. It then worked its way backwards through our entire sordid history of her being a lot better than me. There was a lot of ground to cover, and I quailed under its knowing scrutiny.

“Thank you, Lesley,” I said meekly. “But I still want to know how you got me a job. You haven’t even told me what it is yet.”

She hopped up, walking back into the kitchen and coming back with two beers, one of which she cheerfully handed to me, waving her wand and wordlessly Vanishing the caps. “Remember Professor Seawoll?”

I blinked and took a drink. It was one of the good beers, dark and silky, that we’d splurged on last week in a fit of economic reckless endangerment, and I took my time swallowing. “Sure,” I said. “Who could forget him? And isn’t he Headmaster Seawoll now?”

“Yeah,” she said. “That’s sort of the point of this story.”

“Speaking of,” I said, “are you ever going to tell me what heinous crime got half our old professors fired?”

“If it had been a crime, they’d be on trial,” she said. “Or pending trial or being charged or in prison without a trial or even just arrested. They’re not, so it’s just a scandal, and _no_ , Peter, fuck off.”

“What’s the point of living with an Auror if you don’t even tell me stuff?”

“Well, right now, the point is that I pay all your bills, freeloader.”

I toasted her and took another pull of the beer. “Which is a _good_ point. What about Seawoll?”

“He came by the office today and took me out for lunch,” she said. “Said he wanted to talk.”

“Isn’t he a little old for you?” I said, and then I used my elbow to deflect the pillow to the face I naturally got for that comment.

“He wanted to _talk_ ,” she said, once she’d finished registering her displeasure, “about offering me the Defense professor job, since he can’t do it anymore now he’s headmaster. I said no, of course. I love the Aurors.”

I followed that conversation to this one and blanched. “I can’t teach Defense.”

“Of course not. No one thinks you can,” she said briskly, which I thought was a slightly unfair level of confidence in my incapabilities, even though I agreed. “But half the professors got fired, Peter, and you can—or I think you can, anyway, and so did Seawoll, once I talked him round—teach Potions.”

“You and Seawoll want me to teach Potions,” I said carefully. “You and Seawoll want me to teach _children_.”

“Yes,” she said. “Oh, come on, Peter, you know what you’re doing well enough and you always used to help me and Bev with the finicky stuff in school, so what’s the problem?”

“The problem is—is— Well, isn’t it a little late to even still be hiring? Term starts in a couple weeks!”

“Massive scandal, remember? He’s been busy. And it means he’s happy to hire you if it means he doesn’t have to go looking for anyone else, so again, _what’s the problem_?”

“Well, I—”

She gave me the Look again: _Star Wars_ shirt, Link, our entire lives since eleven.

I sighed. “Thank you, Lesley.”

“Good,” she said. “Call your mum and tell her you’re gainfully employed again.”

“Sure.” I was even grabbing my phone before I thought of something. “Hang on, if I teach at Hogwarts, I have to live at Hogwarts, right?”

“I think I noticed our professors around quite a lot while we were in school, yes. Why, you don’t want to?”

“I was just wondering if you were going to be okay paying rent on this place on your own.”

“I’ve been paying half your rent anyway,” she said, “since you’ve been on the dole.” But then she looked down and picked at the label on her beer awkwardly, which was so unlike her that I bit back any cutting remarks I was planning in response to that.

I put on my most sensitive listening face, not that she noticed. “What’s up?”

She took a deep breath and leaned towards me. “Look, you can’t tell anyone.”

“Okay,” I said immediately, because when Lesley says I can’t tell anyone something, she really, really means it. We’ve been best friends since eleven, living together since eighteen, so sometimes she talks about work, even if she isn’t supposed to—I nod, hug her, get her drunk, and keep my mouth shut.

“I’m actually going undercover for a bit,” she said, “so it might be better if I’m living alone anyway, and it’ll definitely be safer for you. And if money’s a bit tighter for a while, so much the better for the story.”

“Oh,” I said carefully. I bit my lip. “The Faceless Man?”

“Yeah.” She frowned. “And I really can’t tell you anything more. I shouldn’t have told you _that_.”

“Sure.” I dropped it, and then, casting around for a change of subject, said, “Shit, do I have to come up with _lesson plans_?” and she laughed.

#

I’m taking this secret to the grave, but the lesson plans were actually kind of fun.

Lesley getting me horrifyingly drunk the night before I left, as a send-off, was also fun, but what decidedly _wasn’t_ was the massive hangover the next morning. There are potions for that, of course, which, yes, I can make, but you’re not supposed to drink them too quickly, because the kickback can be murder. Not quite literally, but I did have a housemate who ended up in the infirmary back in sixth year.

I waited, drank slowly, and by the time I managed to get out of the apartment without the kind of headache that makes me rethink my stance towards religion and hard drugs, I was running seriously late. Which is how I ended up outside King’s Cross, with my stuff very haphazardly packed, racing to try and catch the goddamn Hogwarts Express for the first time in almost a decade.

(“You’re taking the _train_?” Lesley’d said, when I mentioned my plans. “You get that you’re not seventeen anymore, right?”

I did, of course, but I also knew that most professors didn’t take the train because they were already living at Hogwarts, so transportation was a moot point. And Hogwarts is a bitch to get to, being Unplottable and covered with enough secrecy spells to knock out your average Muggle, and it’s not like any students were going to find me especially authoritarian or intimidating anyway. At that point, I figured, I might as well take the easy option.)

So it was this extremely dignified figure I was cutting when I ran straight into the guy walking the other way down the street. I toppled back and landed on my trunk, which immediately popped open and spilled a few things onto the pavement, of fucking course, even though I was certain I’d locked it earlier. I wasn’t paying that much attention to that, though—which would prove to be extremely stupid—because I was too busy trying to scramble to my feet and apologize.

The guy I’d hit hadn’t fallen down, thank God, just stumbled back a few steps before getting his feet underneath him again. Which was a very good thing, because I wasn’t sure his suit could survive contact with London pavement. He was maybe forty, maybe a bit older, but it was a very good forty—a few touches of grey in his hair, but his suit was well-tailored enough that I couldn’t help taking quick note of the nice shoulders and trim waist.

“I apologize,” he said, reaching out a hand to help steady me. “I wasn’t looking where I was going. Are you quite all right?”

“That’s all right, I wasn’t either,” I said, dusting myself off. “Uh, obviously. I’m fine, and it was definitely my fault, are you—?”

“Perfectly all right,” he assured me, and then his gaze drifted past me, and his eyes widened slightly. “Ah, you appear to be having a small problem with your luggage.”

I turned around to look and swore reflexively. What I’d ignored coming out of my trunk had been a couple potions, in various states of preparedness, and some of them had spilled out on the pavement, mixing in ways they were not supposed to. Two of them had combined and somehow reacted in a way that was causing a gas to rise up into the air—which was interesting, actually. I thought one of those was half-made burn salve, and the other was almost certainly a failed version of the thing I wasn’t telling Lesley I was working on, and neither of them had ever shown any tendencies towards evaporation before. “Huh,” I said, watching them spill into each other and fizzing into a fine mist. “That’s interesting.”

“Are they supposed to be doing that?” the man said, which reminded me that, oh, wait, the street right in front of London’s busiest Muggle train station might not be the best place for scientific curiosity. Which just goes to show that I do know that there’s a time and place, whatever Lesley says.

“Uh, not exactly.” Inventing wildly on the spot, I added, “I’m, um, a theater technician, and those are for…props. Scenery! A, uh, a different kind of fog effect.”

“A blue one, yes, I can see how that would be useful.”

“For creepy forest scenes,” I said, and then I remembered that the not-telling-Lesley potion might be dangerous. “Oh, fuck.”

We were starting to attract some attention, since even in London, where people mostly try to avoid significant contact with strangers, no human alive can help being nosy. “Oh, fuck,” I said again, trying to think how to deal with a potentially dangerous potions accident in the middle of London, surrounded by Muggles, without missing my train.

I was about five horrifying seconds from actually saying ‘nothing to see here’ when the guy, who I’d almost forgotten about, said, “Here, let me.”

“No, wait, don’t,” I said desperately, trying to think of a decent excuse, and then he gave me a very calm look and said, “Cover my wand arm, won’t you? I’d hate to have to Obliviate anyone; it always takes so much explaining afterwards.”

“Uh,” I said, and then he pulled out a dark, sturdy looking wand from who knows where, and I scrambled to get between him and any interested Muggles and forgot all about talking in favor of watching some of the neatest nonverbal spellcasting I’d ever seen.

“I’m afraid I can’t separate them out again,” he said conversationally, as my bottles reformed and the liquids—along with the weird blue gas—were neatly siphoned back in and sealed up tightly. “I wouldn’t even know where to begin.”

“That’s all right,” I said, staring. As I watched, something that looked like a Shield Charm folded itself around all the bottles, but Protego doesn’t normally stay up for longer than a couple minutes. This formed a neat and stable-looking sphere, which lifted up and settled back into my trunk, leaving absolutely no evidence of the spills on the pavement. “I’d rather keep the blue gas anyway. I have no idea how that happened.”

“Aren’t they ruined?”

“Oh, sure, but I’m still interested why.” I looked over to see him frowning at me, but he didn’t look upset, just a little confused. “Uh, so you’re…” I thought about the various ways I could finish that sentence. _A wizard. Really good at magic. Seriously fucking hot._ Well. Probably I shouldn’t say that last one.

After a moment of me failing to say anything else, he smiled a little, looking amused. “Thomas Nightingale,” he said, holding out a hand to me. “I work at Hogwarts. Or at least, I do now.”

“Oh,” I said, shaking his hand automatically and trying not to think about what a spectacularly bad first impression I’d probably just made. It’s one thing if it’s in front of the hot stranger you never see again, it’s quite another when it’s the hot coworker you’re going to live in the same building with for at least the next nine months. “Peter Grant. Potions professor, actually. As of a couple weeks ago.”

“Oh?” he said. “I’m Defense, then, since we’ll be working together.”

“Nice to meet you,” I said. “I promise I’m not normally a hazard to innocent bystanders, but I broke the last of the unbreakable beakers last week, and I haven’t had time to get any new ones.”

He raised his eyebrows, and I went back over that sentence mentally. “Oh—they’re not really as unbreakable as advertised.” Which just made him look a little like he might laugh at me, so I added, weakly, “My best mate says I have a talent for destruction.”

“But in a way that’s not normally hazardous to innocent bystanders,” he said dryly.

I blinked. “I think I just realized how badly this conversation is going for me.”

“Ah,” he said. “Just now?”

“Yeah,” I said, grinning at him. “Just now.”

He lips twitched in response, and for a moment, I thought he was going to laugh, which would’ve been awesome, you know, in that _the-hot-guy-who’s-stupidly-good-at-magic-thinks-I’m-funny_ kind of way. (Lesley says my thing for people who are good at things is creepy and bordering on fetishistic, but I say she’s just offended I stopped having a thing for _her_ after we left school and started living together.) But he just said, “Possibly that’s something for you to work on, then.”

“Possibly,” I agreed, and then I glanced down at my watch, not really thinking about it. “Oh, fuck me.”

“Is everything all right?”

“Oh, yeah—I mean, no, not really.” I cycled through a bunch of feelings and eventually ended up with a shrug. It’s not like I could catch up to it now, and Seawoll might be pissed, but at least he couldn’t give me detention anymore. Probably. “I forgot about the train, and it’s definitely past eleven now.”

“The train?” he said, sounding confused, and then his face cleared. “Oh, were you going to take the train to the school?”

“Yeah,” I said ruefully. “Why, weren’t you?”

He made a face that I figured I could safely interpret as horror that I’d even suggested such a thing, before he seemed to get himself under control again. “I hadn’t planned on it, no. The train is for students, after all.”

“We’re allowed to use it,” I pointed out, “so I don’t think it’s just for students. And if you weren’t planning on taking it, what are you doing outside King’s Cross? That’s a hell of a coincidence.”

“Just in the area,” he said, though I couldn’t think of a single reason why he would be, except for the station. He looked away, and then he tilted his head to the side, just slightly, and met my eyes again. “Would you like a ride?”

#

“Oh, _fuck me_ ,” I said, when I saw the ride he’d meant.

He looked back at me, amusement glittering in his gray eyes, and said, “I’m going to choose to take that as a sign of approval, I think.”

“Fuck me,” I said again. “That’s a Jaguar Mark 2, isn’t it? With the 3.8 liter XK6 engine?”

“It is,” he said, sounding a trifle smug, which, well—he had a right to be. “I’m afraid I’ve never totally gotten the hang of modern Muggle technology, but I am quite fond of their cars.”

“It’s beautiful,” I said, reaching out a hand to stroke the hood covetously. It was dinged up here and there, but I was willing to bet the engine still worked fine. Nightingale leaned against the door and watched me, looking pleased. “Whoever you bought it from must have kept it in really good condition. Unless—does it drive off of magic, or something?”

That’d be a bit disappointing, but still good, and something I should’ve expected, anyway. Just because _I_ didn’t think anyone should ever try to make a car like this drive without a proper engine didn’t mean most Pureblood wizards were going to feel the same way.

“No, you’re right. The, ah, the man who sold it to me had kept in extremely good repair,” he said, surprising me. “I try to do the same. Which isn’t to say that I’ve never fixed a part magically or simply duplicated one I needed to replace—”

“Sure,” I said, trying to blink away the sudden, devastating image of this impeccably dressed posh English gentleman playing grease monkey.

“—but it does run completely without magic. Well, when it’s only driving anyway. When it flies, there is _some_ magic involved.”

“Fuck me,” I said again.

#

We didn’t fly to Scotland, unfortunately, even though I did my damnedest to convince Nightingale that we should. He just laughed and told me it would be a waste of the concealment magic we’d have to use to hide from the Muggles. He was right, but that didn’t mean it wouldn’t have also been insanely cool.

Tragically, Nightingale didn’t think that was as good a point as I did.

I did question whether we were going to make it to Hogwarts in time, but he just grinned at me, in a way that was a lot less tightly buttoned-up than I would’ve expected (and also might’ve turned me on a bit), and _floored_ it. Even before we got out of London, he went at least fifteen kilometers per hour faster than anyone else on the road, zipping through gaps in traffic I wouldn’t have dared in a car half the size of the Jag.

“Are you using magic for _this_?” I said, hanging on for dear life and laughing like a maniac.

“Of course not,” he said, managing to sound slightly offended. “It’s only driving. Everyone does it. Why on earth should I need magic for that?”

“Everyone does _not_ do it, at least not the way you do,” I said. “And I’d definitely need magic for— _watch out_!”

He practically flew around a truck that could’ve crushed us easily and said, patiently, “I do know what I’m doing.”

“I have never seen _anyone_ drive like you,” I said. “Are you sure you’re not hiding a second career as a racecar driver? Or stunt driver in films?”

He laughed, but when I glanced over at him, I thought he looked a little flattered. “Yes, Peter,” he said. “You’ve found me out. I’m a Muggle athlete.”

“Knew it,” I said cheerfully.

I had a feeling Nightingale was barely managing to suppress the urge to roll his eyes as he executed another physics-defying turn.

“No, but really,” I said. “I’ve never met a Pureblood who didn’t use _some_ magic for driving, even if it was just a few extra-sensory spells or something.”

“I’ve always thought that that rather misses the point,” Nightingale said.

“The point?”

“I like driving. I didn’t learn as a child, no, but I did learn, and…” He took one hand off of the wheel—I may have yelped a _tiny_ bit—and gestured vaguely. “I enjoy the focus necessary. And I suppose that spells aiding you might be practical, but it does rather remove the thrill, wouldn’t you say?”

“Oh,” I said. “I get it. You’re an adrenaline junkie. Well, at least if we die, I won’t have to try and actually figure out how to teach children.”

“I am not an—an _adrenaline junkie_ ,” he said, pronouncing the words like if he wasn’t careful, they might get on his clothes. “And we’re not going to die, Peter, really.”

“Total adrenaline junkie. I bet you think skydiving is fun,” I said.

He blinked several times. “Skydiving?”

“Oh. Uh, Muggle thing. They jump out of planes? Planes are—”

“I know what planes are,” he said patiently. “But they jump out? Isn’t that rather…well, fatal?”

“They don’t just jump out,” I assured him quickly. “They have these… Huh.” I tried to think how on earth I could explain and said carefully, “Like cloth sacks that, uh, catch the air and slow you down?” Fuck, I sounded like a moron.

“Oh, parachutes,” he said, shocking me completely. “I suppose that makes sense.” He apparently noticed me gaping at him, because he huffed and said, “I’m not sure where you got the idea that I’m stupid, Peter.”

“Are you a Pureblood?” I demanded, ignoring that. “Because I just realized you never actually said, so are you actually mixed or Muggle or something and feeling too awkward about me assuming to say anything?”

“I’m a Pureblood,” he said. “That doesn’t mean I don’t know what airplanes and parachutes are.”

“In my experience, it usually does.”

“I’m fond of cars, but you’re surprised I know about the ones Muggles built that fly?”

I thought about it. “All right, that makes sense. Parachutes?”

He shrugged. “It…came up.”

“ _When_?”

“Oh, you know,” he said vaguely. “It’s amazing what one learns over the course of a life.”

“Uh-huh,” I said, filed that away as deeply shifty, and then felt bad about it. I had no valid reason to be suspicious of him at all, so I should’ve been making small talk with a new coworker instead of filing anything anywhere, but living with Lesley the Auror for so long had ingrained some habits in me that I apparently couldn’t break. And one of them was ‘if people don’t want to talk about seemingly innocuous things, it’s probably something to look into.’

#

We actually did beat the train to Hogwarts, mostly because Nightingale broke about every speeding law in the books and possibly a few in physics textbooks. Not that I’d know, necessarily, since my physics curriculum past the age of ten was distinctly lacking. Wizards and science have never even heard of each other.

I remembered Headmaster Seawoll well, right down to the very nostalgic glare he leveled in our direction when we stepped into the front hall.  He’d taught Defense back when I was in school, and he’d loved Lesley and thought I was totally useless—basically accurate, admittedly. Luckily, this time around he barely glanced at me, fixing Nightingale with a gimlet eye and looking about as displeased as I’d ever seen him.

“Thomas,” he said, sounding like he’d love to add, ‘get the hell out.’

“Alexander,” Nightingale said politely. “It’s a pleasure to see you again.”

Seawoll’s glare, if possible, deepened. “Like hell it is,” he said. “You’re late.”

“Oh?” Nightingale said mildly. “Has the feast already started?”

“Most professors like to get here before that,” Seawoll said. When Nightingale just kept looking at him, eyebrows slightly raised, he made an extremely displeased sound. “You have an hour.”

“How nice,” Nightingale said. “I’ll see you there.”

“I guess you fucking will.” Then he finally seemed to register my presence. “Grant? Since when do you two know each other?”

“We just met,” I said, pretending I was a block of wood that hadn’t noticed any of that. “Sir.”

He shook his head. “My condolences to you, in that case. Tell May that anytime she wants his job, it’s hers.” He directed one last glare Nightingale’s way and left us to it.

I stared after him, and then I turned back to Nightingale and dropped the oblivious act. “I’m guessing you two know each other?”

“Hmm?” he said. “Oh, yes, quite.”

“And he hates you.”

“That’s a strong word,” he said. “But he’s not terribly fond of me, no.”

I nodded slowly. “Then why’d he offer you the job?” I’ve been told I have no respect for other people’s privacy, but I was too curious not to just let it go, and I’ve never exactly been good at knowing when not to ask a question.

“He was…” Nightingale smiled faintly. I don’t think I’m wrong in saying it looked just this side of self-satisfied. “I believe the correct word would be ‘desperate.’ I don’t think he had many options, and he had quite a few positions to fill.”

Yeah, if a guy who hated me that much had been desperate for me to work for him, I’d be smug too.

I nodded. “Okay, so why’d you take it? I mean, I don’t think I’d want my boss to hate my guts before I even started the job, and, uh. It doesn’t seem like you need the money.”

“I owed him a favor,” Nightingale said, after a moment. “Besides, however he feels about me, I’ve never actually disliked Alexander Seawoll. Even though we have butted heads on more than one occasion.”

I glanced back at where Seawoll’d stomped off. “No kidding.”

“Yes, well.” He glanced at his watch. “It was lovely to meet you, Peter.”

“Oh—uh, yeah, you too. I’ll see you at the feast?”

“Of course.”

I watched him go, and yes, I did get a nice eyeful of his arse in those tight trousers, but then I shook my head briskly. Just because I had a history of ill-advised crushes on coworkers and classmates didn’t mean that I had to keep up the pattern. I absolutely did _not_ spend any more time thinking about how good he’d looked driving that car and instead went upstairs to find my rooms and write Lesley.

#

Lesley and I have been best friends since eleven, but it’s shocking how much time you don’t get to spend with people at Hogwarts if you aren’t actually in the same house, so we’ve been using work-arounds for ages. Bev, too, sometimes, but she’s less—well, she was off doing her own thing more often. Me and Lesley stuck together.

When we were kids, we mostly made do with sneaking out after curfew and nicking food from the kitchens to eat somewhere without designated tables, but in sixth year, we invented texting.

Not actually, obviously, because then we would be millionaires, and I would not be taking jobs I am not qualified for. But we stole the idea, and then I taught myself how to do a Protean. Potions are my thing, but I was always pretty good at Charms, too, so I enchanted a couple of notebooks for us, and we’ve been doing that ever since. Anything that gets written in one appears in the other instantly. Texting, only no satellites or circuits or anything else that goes haywire when you introduce magic.

I dumped my stuff once I got to my new office without bothering to unpack, took out our current notebook, and opened it to the most recent page. Lesley’d left me a message—

_Good luck with the terrifying eleven-year-olds. Call me if you need to be rescued from their evil and probably criminal ways—remember, law enforcement is just a message away._

She was always so comforting and supportive in my times of need, really.

 _Thanks_ , I wrote. _By the way, Seawoll says the Defense position is still open to you whenever you want it._

And I knew she really did care, because she replied almost immediately, which meant she must’ve been watching her notebook, waiting for me. _Why_ , she said, _is his new Defense professor as underwhelming as you?_

_Haha, very funny. No, his new Defense professor’s actually really impressive, but apparently Seawoll hates him._

_Really? Who is it?_ There was a brief pause where I tried to figure out how to explain the man I’d just met, and Lesley presumably thought what I’d said through, because she added, _Also, the new Defense professor’s ‘really impressive’? Peter. Have some self-control._

It’s honestly kind of annoying how well she knows me. _Fuck you too, May_ , I wrote, but I didn’t bother actually disputing the implication. It wasn’t worth it, and it wouldn’t’ve worked, anyway. _His name’s Thomas Nightingale_ , I added. _Forties, white, posh, Pureblood._

 _Huh_ , she said, and then nothing.

I finally got tired of waiting and wrote a series of question marks to try and hurry her along.

 _You’re about as patient as the children you’re supposed to be teaching_ , she said, the final curl of the G leaving a long enough streak of ink across the page that I could tell I’d made her grumpy. _I was just thinking that I can’t remember any Aurors called that_.

I frowned. _Who says he was an Auror?_

 _Seawoll’s got this thing_ , she replied. _Says people teaching kids to defend against the Dark Arts should have some professional experience actually defending against them. I think that’s bullshit, actually_ , she added. _Knowing how to teach it’s more important than knowing how to do it. But he told me that when he was offering me the job, and I got the feeling it was important to him._

I tapped my quill against the page thoughtfully, sending drops of ink flying and making little black dots across our conversation. They smudged as Lesley presumably tried to wipe them out on the other end of things.

_Ugh, Peter, really? Anyway, it’s not like it matters. I guess he could’ve been a Hit Wizard? Or maybe he was just useless. That’d explain why Seawoll hates him and why I can’t remember anyone mentioning the name, even though he can’t have quit that long ago if he’s forty._

I snorted, thinking of the way Nightingale’d expertly contained my Potions mishap on the pavement outside a major Muggle railway. _He’s not useless_ , I wrote.

_Right, or else you wouldn’t be into him._

_LESLEY._

_What? You know it’s true. Someone shows off a little, and you get an erection. It’s practically Pavlovian. Studies could be written about you_.

 _I can’t believe how much I hate you_.

_Whatever. Anyway, your new inappropriate workplace crush doesn’t sound even remotely familiar, which means I can’t get you any dirt on him. Though if he WAS an Auror, bet he got people bugging him about the Nightingale all the time. Hell of a last name to have._

I blinked at the page, totally confused. _As in the bird?_

_NO, Peter. Ex-Auror from the fifties and sixties. Totally rehauled the department after the shit with WWII, slightly famous. Apparently a badass, probably smoking hot, but the only picture I’ve ever seen is him at like 80. So not that attractive. Anyway, Nightingale wasn’t his surname, or I’d wonder if yours is any relation, just a sort of nickname, but it’s what the whole department calls him. I don’t even know what his real name was, I’m not sure anyone’s ever said._

_SLIGHTLY famous, I see. Why the Nightingale? That’s not exactly a name to strike fear into the hearts of your nemeses._

_Apparently he could turn into one. Animagus. Might not be that intimidating, but I bet it was great for undercover work._

_Speaking of_ , I tried, but she literally cut me off, slashing a long line of ink straight through my words and then doing it again and again until you couldn’t see any sign of what I’d written. I was really glad we bought notebooks with thick paper, but even so, I had a feeling we’d be writing around black boxes for the next few pages. I could practically feel her judgment and annoyance radiating off the page. But then, she had a point.

 _So he might not be a badass Animagus who rehauled the Aurors,_ I wrote as a peace offering and a sign that I got it, _but Nightingale’s still pretty hot._

_I FUCKING KNEW IT. Peter, you disaster._

I rolled my eyes and let her tease me. Better that than talking about definitely classified information I absolutely wasn’t supposed to know, and I had a feeling it made her happy to do it.

#

By the time I made it down to the feast, dressed in real—and hopefully at least vaguely impressive looking—robes, the students were already pouring in. I slid into a seat at the staff table next to a witch who only looked about ten years older than me, tops, which was something of a relief. The way I remembered it, Hogwarts was entirely staffed by wizards and witches sixty and over, and I didn’t want to be half the age of everyone I worked with. She was also pretty, with a frizz of blonde hair—that bright, shockingly pale color you get from bleach, though given her eyelashes and the fine hair on her arms, I thought it was probably natural—dark, liquid eyes, and a tiny rosebud mouth. Between her good looks and Nightingale’s everything, I didn’t have a lot of faith in my ability to not develop some kind of inappropriate, uncomfortable, and ultimately unfulfilled attraction to someone I was supposed to have a professional relationship with.

“Hi,” I said, when she turned to look at me, sweeping her eyes from my toes all the way up to the top of my head. I felt uncomfortably as though I’d forgotten to brush my teeth. “Peter Grant, Potions.”

“Mellissa Oswald,” she said after a moment, shaking my hand. “Herbology. New this year, same as you. I suppose we might’ve been at school together, but I don’t remember you at all.”

That was a relief, since I didn’t either, which I quickly assured her of. I _did_ , however, recognize the old man on sitting on the other side of her, yawning gently into his hand. “Uh, Oswald,” I said, trying not to seem like I thought there was only one family called ‘Oswald’ in the country. “Any relation—”

“He’s my granddad,” she said, rolling her eyes. “And he was supposed to _retire_ at the end of last year.”

“Hmm?” Professor Oswald said, who’d taught me History of Magic the last time I’d been in this castle. I remembered him weighing more back then, though—his robes looked more like curtains, no bulk at all behind them. He reminded me of a skeleton, an image not helped by his sunken eyes or the loose, wrinkled skin on his hands, hanging off his bones as if clinging on with its last breath. If you asked me, this was the look of a man who should’ve retired well before last year.

“Oh, really, Mellissa,” he said, “I was hardly going to leave poor Alexander in the lurch, was I? Not when he was already replacing so much of the teaching staff.” He met my eyes and smiled—kind and a bit foggy, and I assured myself that under no circumstances was he going to keel over dead at the dinner table. “I recognize you, don’t I?”

“Peter Grant, sir,” I said. “I’m not sure if you remember me, I—”

“Oh, yes, _Grant_ ,” he said. “I do remember. You wrote a very good paper on the intersections and relationships between Muggle and magical architecture, didn’t you?”

“Uh,” I said, feeling oddly caught out. “Yes, sir. I’m surprised you remember.”

He waved a hand, laughing, and I expected to hear his bones creak. “Oh, come, come, Grant, I’m not that old. Next, you and my granddaughter will be telling everyone I’ve got dementia. Just because I get a little tired—good Lord, _Thomas_?”

“Hello, Hugh,” Nightingale said, settling down next to me. He gave me a brief, fleeting smile and then introduced himself to Mellissa, who looked just as suspicious of him as she had of me—more, even. On his other side, a very ginger man, a little older than Nightingale, sat down and gave us all a wave.

Oswald stared at Nightingale, with more focus than I thought he could muster, tired as he seemed. “Well, you look…” He shook his head. “How on earth did Alexander manage to pull you out of hiding?”

“He asked,” Nightingale said dryly.

“Was that all it took?” Oswald said, coughing into his hand. “You could’ve fooled me. Where’s Harold? We ought to get all of us old-timers here, we could have a party.”

Nightingale snorted softly, smiling a little.

After a moment, I remembered Harold Postmartin too, the resident librarian and nearly as aged as Hugh Oswald. I frowned. “Old-timers?” I said to Nightingale. “You’re not even as old as Seawoll.”

Professor Oswald coughed again, hard.

Nightingale just shrugged. “I’ve been told I was born sixty-five,” he said, “so surely I must be a little over that by now. Mellissa, Peter, have you met Healer Abdul Haqq Walid? He runs the infirmary here.”

“No,” I said. “Hi, I’m Peter Grant. Salaam.”

“Assalaamu alaykum,” the extremely red-haired Abdul Haqq Walid said, with a soft Highland accent. Being a nosy bastard with no respect for personal privacy—in the words of an ex-girlfriend—I was tempted to ask, but I found just enough tact lurking around my brain to keep my mouth shut.

We were saved from having to make any more conversation by Miriam Stephanopoulos, ushering the new first years in. She plopped the Sorting Hat onto the stool and glared us all into quiet submission, just as terrifying as I remembered her.

Nice to know some things don’t change.

I kind of spaced out for the whole childishly rhymed song and Sorting of a bunch of kids I’d never met before—well, I paid a _little_ attention to the Ravenclaws, out of leftover House pride—and tried to think about my job and teaching and potions. That’s normally not very hard for me, and in fact, Lesley has been known to wish I’d do a little less of it, but I got distracted halfway through when it clicked in my head that Hogwarts has flying buttresses and an awful lot of Gothic architecture, which absolutely does not make sense for the time period the castle was supposedly built in. I hadn’t noticed as a kid, but then, I’d first been eleven and then used to it.

At some point, I was gently poked in the side, and I jumped and turned. Nightingale was looking at me. I thought he might be biting his lip on a smile.

“It’s over,” he said quietly, like he was trying to keep the rest of the table from noticing my mental truancy. “There’s food.”

I blinked, and sure enough, the tables were heavy with the weight of all the dishes on them. I’d almost forgotten how ridiculous Hogwarts feasts were, though I already missed my mum’s cooking. Ham and potatoes and treacle are all well and good, but sometimes I want something with some actual seasoning beyond salt and pepper.

“Thanks,” I said to Nightingale. “I, uh. Got distracted.”

“I noticed,” he said. “What on earth were you thinking about so intently?”

“Whether or not a group of wizards literally restructured the stonework of this place sometime after the twelfth century,” I said honestly.

He stared at me. “Really?”

“Yeah,” I said. “What do you think?”

He stared at me some more, which is pretty normal for when I start going on about things like this. Well, Lesley tends to smack me and tell me to focus, but we have a special relationship. He mostly looked slightly bemused, which is reasonable and about what I’ve come to expect. “About wizards restructuring the stonework?” he said.

“Yeah,” I said. “Hogwarts was established in the tenth century, and according to _Hogwarts, A History_ , it’s never been moved, but Gothic architecture like this wasn’t really a thing until a couple hundred years later. Even then, it was in France. What do you think?”

He with one side of his mouth after a moment, looking rueful. “You know, I can’t say I’ve ever thought about it, partly because I had no idea when Gothic architecture was popular.”

“I mean, it’s the only logical option, right?” I said. “Because it’s not as if wizards were ever ahead of Muggles in terms of architecture—behind, almost, since we can do so much with magic that we don’t actually need to bother figuring out how to do something like build bigger structures. Who cares? Just fit extra rooms into the house you’ve got. But why would they have bothered changing it?”

Nightingale looked up at the ceiling. “I suppose they thought it was more beautiful.”

“It would’ve been a lot of work,” I pointed out.

“Then they must’ve been very sure it was worth it,” he said, and then that smile returned, wry. “Or else they just wanted to impress someone.”

I laughed. “That’ll be it. Hogwarts Castle, entirely built to get a date. No wonder they left it out of the history books.”

“Do I want to know what you two are talking about?” Healer Walid said, leaning forward and raising his eyebrows at both of us.

“Architecture,” Nightingale said, his voice extremely bland, but with a tiny smirk pulling at the corners of his mouth.

Walid stared. “Thomas, do you _know_ anything about architecture?”

“Gothic architecture originated in France in the twelfth century,” he said promptly and a little smugly. And then he looked at me, with an expression I recognized a bit from Lesley, when the joke’s on someone else for once and she’s inviting me to share, and added, “Apparently.”

“I can’t believe you were actually paying that much attention,” I told him.

Walid shook his head. “For someone as un-academically minded as Thomas,” he said, “it’s really amazing how much he genuinely listens to those of us who are.”

Nightingale smiled again, but it looked a little withdrawn, like he was thinking of something else. “Practice,” he said. “I’ve been friends with you a good long time, after all. As long as I’m not required to respond intelligently, I’ve never minded lending an ear.” He picked up his knife and fork, pointedly smoothing the cloth napkin over his lap. “You should eat, Peter. The architecture of Hogwarts will still be there after dinner; the food will not.”

He had a point, so I helped myself to some of the pork. “Still,” I said, mostly because I honestly couldn’t help myself, “if they really did magically change the architecture two hundred years in, between that and all the magical wards and secret rooms and such, it’s no wonder the castle’s layout is so crazy and confused.”

“Oh, is _that_ what you were talking about?” Walid said. “It’s an interesting hypothesis, I suppose, but I hardly think you’d need it with, as you say, the wards and the secret rooms and, honestly, Rowena Ravenclaw being directly involved in the planning. The moving stairs are her fault, you know.”

“Oh, sure, but were the _trick_ stairs?” I said. “Because that seems like the kind of bollocks that Helga Hufflepuff should’ve objected to, to be honest.”

Nightingale looked between us with the air of a man resigned to his fate, but he also listened for the rest of dinner without complaining once. He even replied a couple of times, proving he must’ve been paying pretty close attention, so I can’t think he actually minded that much.

#

After dinner, I set to work unpacking, since I hadn’t bothered earlier. I’ve yet to meet anyone who actually enjoys moving, but I used to clean offices with my mum when I was a kid, so I’ve got some experience doing things no one enjoys. I’m good at zoning out while I do manual labor, and I managed to get into a kind of groove of mindless organizing. And at least going back to living at Hogwarts meant I didn’t have to mess with furniture—and also that the nicest Potions lab I’ve ever seen was all mine. Talk about perks of the job.

I did get a little distracted inspecting the equipment, I have to admit, so I jumped in surprise when I heard the knock on the door. When I opened it to reveal two students, casually waiting as one covered a yawn with the back of his hand, I was even more confused.

“Isn’t it a little late for you two to be out in the halls?” I said.

The girl, whose deep red hijab perfectly matched the trim on her robes, rolled her eyes at me and gestured at the Head Girl badge pinned to her chest. “Professor Stephanopoulos asked us to go round and welcome all the new professors, since there’s so many of you. To ease the transition, she said.”

“And let you take our measure too, I bet,” I said.

She exchanged a glance with the Hufflepuff boy at her side and then shrugged at me. “Well, sure. That eases the transition for the students too, see.”

“Well, sure,” I repeated. “Come on in, then.”

They followed me into my new office, politely stepping around my trunks and not commenting on the mess. I pushed everything to the sides of the room with a quick wave of my wand and gestured them towards the chairs on the opposite side of the desk. “Want some tea, or something?” I said. “I could probably find the kettle if I tried.”

“No need,” the boy said. “We did just eat, after all.”

“Right,” I said, settling down into the chair opposite them. “I’m Peter Grant, but I’m kind of guessing you knew that already.”

The boy nodded. “I’m Jaget Kumar, and this is Sahra Guleed.”

“Nice to meet both of you.” I leaned back, crossing my arms over my chest. “Hey, any chance you can tell me how half the Hogwarts professors got fired all at the same time?”

“It’s like you think we haven’t been asked that by all the reporters in the world, or something,” Sahra said, looking about as unimpressed as I’ve ever seen a teenager—which is impressive, teenagers are the most unimpressed creatures on the planet. Also, I knew Beverley Brook when she was that age.

“Yeah, but I’m your professor and an authority figure,” I tried. They just looked at me. “Yeah, I didn’t think that was going to work either.”

“Why do you even think we know?” Jaget said, his voice patient and very reasonable.

“Optimism, mainly.”

Sahra Guleed gave me an extremely sarcastic once-over, which, all things being equal, I probably deserved. “Oh? And how’s that working out for you?”

I considered it. My life, that is, and how up until extremely recently, I’d been jobless and broke in a London flat, and now I was a professor at one of the best schools of magic in the world, where at least one new and unfairly attractive coworker didn’t hate me. All of which I’d gotten through essentially no personal effort. “Pretty well, actually.”

“Not this time,” she said, but she mostly looked amused.

I shrugged. “Worth a try.” I stared at them, but they just stared back at me. Unlike Lesley, who can outstare a cat, and probably work out its name and address while she does, I tend to get a little twitchy with prolonged silences. And then I forget why I’m not talking and just get curious, which is probably why I was the one who broke the stalemate with, “So, how do you guys feel about taking your NEWTS with half new professors who are trying to remember the material well enough to teach it and wouldn’t know standardized coursework if it walked up and said hello?”

Jaget sighed and closed his eyes, and Sahra scowled at me.

“Not good, then,” I hazarded.

“Worse all the time,” Sahra said, which I thought was a little unfair.

“I didn’t say _I_ didn’t remember the material.” Trying to justify yourself to your students is actually not a great way to start off, but it was late, and in my defense, I was very new to this whole thing.

“Right, because you took your NEWTS, what, a year ago?” Sahra said. I got the impression she was even more tired than I was, and that she’d potentially done one too many of these new-teacher-meet-and-greets. Under the circumstances, I graciously gave her a pass on rudeness.

Also, because, “I’m not certain whether or not to be insulted,” I admitted. “Not bad you think I look young, but nineteen’s stretching it a bit, don’t you think?”

“ _Sahra_ ,” Jaget said. I had a feeling he’d’ve liked to add, ‘ _Professor Grant_ ,’ in just the same tone of voice, and it was only his staunch professionalism in the face of the rest of the rest of us morons that was keeping him in check. “Sorry, sir, it’s been a long day.” He hesitated, then shrugged, clearly deciding I was not the kind of professor to stand much on ceremony. “And looking to be a long year. You weren’t wrong.”

“Yeah, my apologies for being involved in that,” I said, though there wasn’t much I could do about it. Besides, I was rather pleased that I had the job and that the last poor bugger—who they’d probably have preferred—didn’t.

“Not your fault,” Sahra said, rolling her eyes and apparently done with sniping at me for my stunning and impressively young-looking features. “Anyway, we’d better be off. Just wanted to say hello, really.”

“Hello,” I agreed, standing when they did. “Hang on, weren’t you meant to be taking my measure? Didn’t you want to ask some questions? Or something?” I might not be a thief-taker like Lesley, but I still had some idea—mostly gleaned from the television, if I’m honest—of what a proper interrogation looked like, and I was pretty sure that hadn’t qualified.

“I think we did,” Jaget said, surprising me. “We’ve met you, talked a bit—that’s basically what Stephanopoulos wanted. You’re all right.”

“Yeah,” Sahra said, opening the door and holding it for him. “You seem mostly harmless.”

I was so used to Lesley and the way she talked all the time that it wasn’t until five minutes later, when I was theoretically shelving some books and mostly actually getting distracted and rereading bits of them, that I realized that was sort of a weird thing for a couple of teenage schoolkids to say.

#

But teenagers being weird was simultaneously the least and most of my worries, because the next day came, and I remembered I had to pretend I knew how to teach a castle full of them. Lesley did her level best to comfort me by reminding me that she was about a million times more likely to die as a result of actual violence in her job than I was as a result of mortifying embarrassment in mine. And Bev had dashed off a quick note wishing me luck—by way of telling me not to fuck it up too bad—which I got from her owl over breakfast. Both of these were, all things considered, sweet things to say, but not actually helpful, as such.

“I don’t suppose,” I said, while trying manfully to not actually bury my head in my porridge like an ostrich, “that you have any advice in being, you know. A real teacher.”

“Peter, you know I’ve been doing this about as long as you have, right?” said Nightingale, who I’d somehow managed to grab a seat next to again. “Which is to say, never before.”

“Yes, but you’re clearly going to be good at it.” I looked him over. He looked good again, of course, and a lot more professional than I ever had. “You’re all—”

“Old?” he supplied dryly.

“ _No_.” It’s possible I said that with slightly more vehemence than was strictly called for, but old is definitely not one of the many words I would’ve used to describe him. “You’re definitely not old. You’re way too—” I stopped, which was lucky, because there was no good way for me to finish that sentence.

Good at things. Fun. Fit.

Yeah, no good way.

“Anyway,” I said, hopefully like someone who’d never ever had inappropriate thoughts about a colleague, “I was _going_ to say, you’ve got, uh, gravitas.”

“Gravitas,” he repeated skeptically.

“Right,” I said. “I’d’ve been pretty impressed with you, as a kid.” Actually, I probably would’ve had a massive crush on him, but that was neither here nor there.

“Really?” he said, and I thought he looked a little flattered.

“Sure.” I poked at my food again. “Seriously, no tips at all?”

“On gravitas? I’m afraid not,” he said. “Peter, I really think you might be better off asking someone who’s done this before.”

I groaned. “I’m going to get eaten alive.”

“That seems extremely unlikely.”

“Yeah?” I said, perhaps a touch snidely. “Know a lot about being eaten alive, do you?”

Just for a second, I saw him smile and his eyes glint with some secret he might be about to tell me. I remembered that according to Lesley, he’d almost certainly been in MLE, and maybe he did know something about being eaten after all, but then the look on his face faded, and he made a noncommittal noise, looking away. “No, that’s a fair point. This looks as much like the development grounds for cannibal children as any other I’ve ever seen.”

I frowned. That hadn’t been what he’d been about to say. I was sure of it. But then I shrugged mentally. Lesley didn’t always want to share what she’d seen either. It didn’t make me any less curious, but it did mean that pushing it made me an arsehole.

“Right,” I said, moving on. “I’m going to die.”

He was far too dignified to roll his eyes, but he somehow managed to project an aura of long-suffering without moving a muscle. “Yes, Peter. You’re going to die.”

“Just so we’re clear on that,” I muttered, and then I went back to burying my panic and embarrassment in my morning tea.

#

I’m pretty sure Lesley’d thought that I was going to have to admit that the whole teaching lark wasn’t that hard after all, but the joke was on her, because it was absolutely genuinely the most difficult thing I’d ever done. And yes, that is saying a lot, because I once came out to my mum and admitted to her that there was a non-zero possibility that biological grandchildren might not be in the offing. It still did not compare to trying to teach pre-teens.

There was a girl in one of my two first-year classes—Gryffindor, named Abigail Kamara, mixed-race, afro, and a terrifyingly inquisitive expression—who was simultaneously clearly the kind of kid I would’ve been friends with, back in the day, and the kind of kid I now, as her teacher, wanted to gently place in a very quiet, very safe room that I absolutely did not have to be in.

They say those that can’t, teach. Maybe the ‘can’t’ in that statement refers to ‘be expected to commit murder or suicide after a day full of trying to control rooms full of kids.’ If so, they’re completely right.

I wasn’t absolutely certain yet that I fit into that category, despite a full day of giving it my best shot. In fact, just contemplating a year of this was enough to make me want to turn in early with a stiff drink. On the other hand, I don’t actually dislike kids, not really, so maybe it was going to get better. And at least it hadn’t gone utterly tits up yet, making me well ahead of some of my direr predictions. I fucking hoped.

I did notice that apparently ‘where you can eat’ strictures had been loosened since I was an actual student, because Sahra Guleed and Jaget Kumar sat together, their heads bent close as they talked to one another. It was as private a conversation as anyone could have, given the locale, and they definitely weren’t inviting intruders as they whispered to each other. Every so often, they’d glance up at the staff table.

I thought at first that model students, Head Boy and Girl, or not, they were planning something they didn’t want to be caught at, but none of the looks they gave the professors were very guilty. Wary, yes, but not guilty. More—assessing.

And after I’d realized that, it wasn’t a long step to spotting that it wasn’t the professors as a whole they were looking at, it was a few in specific. And all new ones. Not me, though, and not Dominic Croft, newly in charge of Care of Magical Creatures. Mellissa Oswald, a bit. Varvara Sidorovna Tamonina, the Transfigurations professor.

And Nightingale.

#

 _Are you ABSOLUTELY SURE_ , I wrote to Lesley later that night, my notebook open on the desk next to the lesson plans I was revising in light of my sudden crash course in what a bitch teaching is, _that you can’t tell me why all those professors don’t teach here anymore?_

 _I absolutely can’t_ , she said. _And to be completely honest, I don’t actually know. Guesses, but that’s all, it’s beyond my pay grade._ There was a long moment where I debated a homework assignment and listened to the fire pop and crack, and then she wrote, very slowly, like she was dragging the quill across the page and it didn’t want to go, _Peter. Is everything okay?_

I bit my lip, but I didn’t have anything to tell her other than a weird hunch and a bad feeling. _It’s fine. Are we meeting up somewhere this weekend? Students are at Hogsmeade, so._

_Well, we definitely are NOW. Listen, I know I made fun of you earlier, for being scared of your students, but now I’m getting worried about you._

I considered, for a moment, being actually scared of Sahra Guleed and Jaget Kumar, but they didn’t seem interested in me, and, on reflection, I was more inclined to think that they were worried about some repeat of last year’s hemorrhage of teachers. As opposed to being actually homicidal or anything like that. Which didn’t tell me much, except that they maybe didn’t think I was one of the ones on my way out. That would’ve been flattering if I thought it had anything to do with my teaching skills. But no—Sahra had said, on her way out the door the night before, that I was ‘mostly harmless.’ Which made the others what?

Not harmless?

If I didn’t have to be worried about Guleed and Kumar, did that mean I did have to be worried about the other professors? The ones they’d been eyeing? I didn’t like that idea any more than the first one, and it was, if anything, more worrying. When it’s not a teaching situation, adults are actually more imposing than seventeen-year-olds.

I shook my head and told myself I was being crazy. It was Hogwarts. I was in about as much danger as I’d be at the Tesco. Less, probably. You get some weirdos shopping.

 _I’m fine_ , I told Lesley. _But I’ll still be really glad to see you on Saturday._

 _Same_ , she wrote back, which almost worried me more than anything else I’d considered all night, because Lesley admits to affection for anything other than mocking purposes only under duress.

I made myself finish my work, but when I finally went to bed, I didn’t sleep well.

#

After class was over on the second day of term, I popped round to the staff room, on the basis that first of all, students might have more trouble finding me there and I could hide, and second of all, that it might do me some good to meet more of my coworkers. The room was the same kind of comfortable posh as the rest of the castle but bigger than I’d expected, enabling the professors to clique up as badly as some of their students did. I felt ten and looking for the right lunch table again, a feeling that had been blessedly absent at Hogwarts, where tables were assigned and I usually ate on the Quidditch pitch with Lesley and Beverley anyway.

I hesitated in the doorway, struck with indecision, but at last I uprooted myself, took a better grip on my lesson plans, and headed for the corner where Dominic Croft and Varvara Tamonina were sitting at a dark wood table. Mellissa was close by on a window seat, keeping a watchful eye on her sleeping granddad in the armchair next to her. I’d considered sticking to Nightingale, but after all, I’d come here to get to know my coworkers. Besides, he was deep in conversation with Seawoll and Stephanopoulos on the other side of the room: whatever they were talking about, I didn’t think Alexander Seawoll would welcome my interruption.

“‘Lo,” Dominic said, in a friendly enough way, when I settled myself a bit awkwardly at another chair at the table. “Peter Grant, right? I think I was just a few years ahead of you in school.”

I had a moment of blank terror, because I didn’t remember him at _all_ , but now I was definitely going to have to pretend I did. Some of it must have shown on my face, because he snorted.

“Just because you blew up the Charms classroom that one time,” he said. “And then one of the greenhouses that other time. We didn’t actually know each other; you can unclench. I’m just surprised they let you back on the grounds.”

“I blow up a lot fewer things these days,” I said, with dignity—and also with a certain amount of untruthfulness, considering how I’d met Nightingale just a couple days ago. I looked him up and down—blond hair, broad face and shoulders, blue eyes, honest expression. He looked like the British answer to Chris Evans’s Captain America, and all of a sudden, I thought I might recognize him after all. “Hang on. Croft, right? Aren’t you the sixth year who got lost in the Forbidden Forest for a week?”

He groaned. “It was three days, honestly. All right, fine, point taken. Both of our reputations precede us. Seawoll must be jumping for joy, having us back.”

“I’ll say. This is the newbie table, then?”

“Seems like it. Thomas Nightingale was even hanging around before Seawoll showed up and started arguing with him.” He gestured expressively over to where Seawoll was, in fact, looking pretty stormy as Nightingale gesticulated about something. “No love lost there, I’d say, so at least maybe our new boss is more pleased to see us than that one. Anyway, Peter, have you met Varvara?”

“Only in passing,” I said, nodding at her across the table. “Hi.”

“Hello.” She reached across the beautiful wood grain table and the expanse of papers she and Dominic had spread out and shook my hand. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

“You as well.” From the name, I’d sort of figured she’d have an accent, but her voice was pure BBC, so that was me shown. “Did you terrorize your teachers when you were at school?”

“Not here,” she said. “I went to Durmstrang; I only moved to England afterwards. I recall I froze and killed a bush of some sort at one point, though. Does that count?”

“Depends how much trouble you got in,” Dominic said.

Mellissa glanced over. “Weren’t any of you normal children? The most trouble I ever got in was for not telling anyone about the beehive outside my window.”

“It probably means we’re in for some rotten karma now that we’re meant to prevent that sort of student disaster.” Dominic pointed his quill at me. “We’ve got it coming, just you see.”

I rather glumly agreed and then changed the subject. “Varvara, was Durmstrang much different from here, do you think? I’ve never met anyone who went anywhere else.”

She hummed thoughtfully. Of the four of us, she certainly looked the most like a schoolteacher—Dominic and Melissa had the messy jobs, so they had an excuse for looking a bit shabby, but then there was also my everything. Varvara, on the other hand, had smart, well-pressed robes, a modern enough cut to show she paid attention but conservative enough to fit a middle-aged professional woman. Even her hair was a neat, even bob. And also fair in coloring, though it was a few shades darker than Dominic’s and well past Mellissa’s platinum—but between her and the other two, I wondered if there’d been some sort of fire sale on blonds at the ‘new professor’ store. Buy two, get one free. Lesley really should’ve taken that job, then I could’ve been truly and completely overwhelmed by Aryan good looks.

“It’s warmer,” Varvara said at last, “and the castle’s quite a bit nicer, as well. Quite large for the number of students. Did the class size used to be bigger, do you know?”

None of us did, but we speculated for a bit, and then she got us talking about some of the castle’s weirder aspects—the secret passages, the trick stairs, the _moving_ stairs, the hidden doors that weren’t really secret passages, just annoying. But when there was enough of a lull in the conversation, I managed to break in again.

“What made you decide to move here, by the way?” I asked, half out of a born Londoner and non-traveler’s genuine curiosity, and half out of a desire to be nosy.

She glanced at me, and for a second, I thought she looked annoyed. But I must’ve imagined it, because she smiled at me, perfectly naturally. “What makes anyone ever decide to move? Perhaps I was caught by the spirit of adventure—or perhaps I just wanted to spend less of my life freezing to death!”

“Well, that’s one thing no one’s ever accused us of before,” Dominic said. “Good weather.”

“Less snow, at least,” she said philosophically. “Or don’t you like England?”

Me and Dominic sort of looked at each other and shrugged. You don’t _like_ England, in my experience: it’s just the place you live, and probably the place you’ll die, and the place where you’ll spend all the bits in between. It’s like liking oxygen—what’s the bloody point?

“Sure,” I said, because I’ve got tact. “Though we’re in Scotland at the moment.”

“Ah, yes. I always forget the distinction matters.”

“Don’t say that in front of any Scots,” Mellissa said, sounding amused, and I jumped, because I hadn’t realized she was still paying attention. “I don’t believe you’d make it out of the conversation alive, or at least, not with all your body parts. I used to live in the country. I know all about how territorial people can get.”

I looked over at her, as casually as I could. She hadn’t said a word all through the discussion of Hogwarts’s weirdness, and her head was still bent over a book, but she must’ve been listening after all. The whole time. Silently. I tried not to think that was creepy.

“I’ll try to remember,” Varvara replied.

“You were living in England before you got this job?” I said.

“Well, I clearly wasn’t living in Scotland,” she joked, smiling brightly. “What about the rest of you? Have I mortally offended with my ignorance?”

We assured her we didn’t care much, and for a while, the talk turned to the small towns Dominic and Mellissa were from, with me occasionally offering a comment on Kentish Town. But something about the conversation was bothering me, and I niggled at it, trying to figure it out. Just when I almost had it, Varvara’s eyes flicked up, looking behind me, and she straightened slightly. If I hadn’t been looking right at her, I would’ve missed it entirely—that, and the way her eyes narrowed just a bit as she tucked her hair behind her ears.

Then a hand came down on the back of my chair, and I just about jumped out of my skin.

“Sorry,” said Nightingale. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

“Fuck me,” I said. “Make some noise, won’t you? You nearly gave me a heart attack.”

“Perhaps you ought to pay more attention,” he suggested, and I grimaced at him. That’s about what Lesley usually says when I fail to notice her entering a room or a car about to run me down or a marching band coming up behind me—though I swear, that last thing was just the once.

“It’s not that I wasn’t paying attention.” He gave me a very tolerant look, and I added, “It’s just that I was paying attention to something else.”

“I’m sure.” He looked round at everyone else. “May I sit?”

We all waved him to a chair immediately, and he settled down next to me. He fit the décor better than even Varvara did, like he’d been designed to sit in plush sitting rooms filled with academically inclined people. It was just the rest of us that were letting the side down, what with me and Dominic the teenage delinquents being right there and all.

“So, did you finish arguing with the headmaster?” Varvara said lightly.

“Hardly arguing,” he replied. “We were just having a conversation about teaching methods. I am in charge of his old class, after all.”

“He was giving you advice?” I said.

He looked over at me again, and his expression went a little wry. “That would be a charitable interpretation, yes. He was…”

“Telling you what to do.”

“Well. Yes.” He flicked his fingers, as if shooing that unpleasantness away. “I did try to impress on him that I can do my job perfectly well without his input.”

“Bet that went over well,” Dominic muttered.

“Quite.”

“What was his advice?” Varvara asked. When we all turned to stare at her, she shrugged. “What? I’ve never done this job before. Perhaps I’d like some input.”

“You’re welcome to ask him, in that case,” Nightingale told her. “Though if I were you, I’d stick to my own methods. I think his are rather particular to him.”

We all glanced over as one to where Seawoll was still talking with Stephanopoulos, but they were leaving. As we watched, they walked out together, deep in conversation, leaning closer together to speak quietly and privately.

“Another time, perhaps.” Nightingale settled back into his chair and took a copy of the Daily Prophet from a pocket of his outer robes. “Have you never done teaching of any sort before this, then?” he said to Varvara almost absently as he opened it up. “What were you working at previously?”

“Freelancing,” she said. “What about you?”

“Traveling. I’m terribly afraid I’m independently wealthy.”

This got him loud groans from me and Dominic, and we both pelted him with balled up bits of parchment, though he deflected them with a neat and wordless Shield Charm.

“Rich and talented, I see,” Varvara said. “That hardly seems fair.”

“It’s bloody not,” Dominic said. “Now, come on, you lot—I’m here to admit to being poor and average, so could one of you please help me figure out how much fucking homework I should be assigning everyone?”

As we all leaned forward to talk and even Mellissa got up to come and look over his shoulder, the thought I’d been having before clicked suddenly.

“Hey, Varvara,” I said, as casually as I could. “What kind of freelancing does a transfiguration specialist do, anyway?”

“If you’re thinking it’s weird and sex-related, you’re wrong,” she said without missing a beat, and I laughed along with everyone else.

But just like every other time I’d asked her a question about her personal life, she’d deflected it neatly. The conversation might have moved on, but I didn’t have any more idea what sort of work she’d done than before—or, for that matter, where she’d lived or why she’d moved. I tucked that thought into the back of my mind to save for when I next saw Lesley, and tried to firmly refocus my mind on Dominic’s bowtruckle lesson.

But it occurred to me that the other person who’d done that, on our car ride and just now, was Nightingale.

#

I Apparated from Hogsmeade to the pub that weekend with a sense of great relief at being out of the castle. Scotland to London is not something I’d recommend doing often, and I had to make it in a few jumps, but it was well worth it to duck through the doors of my old local. It was even better to see Lesley already there and waiting for me, settled at a booth at the back and drinking a pint. I slid into the seat across from her, and she chucked my mobile at me in greeting.

“Oh, thank fuck,” I said, turning it on and reveling in the heady joy of experiencing modern technology for the first time in a week.

“If you start drooling, I’m going to walk right out of here,” Lesley said, sliding a drink over to me and rolling her eyes. “Call your mum, check your texts and emails, and then we really need to talk. If you start playing Pokémon Go, I’m going to kill you.”

“I wouldn’t play Pokémon Go while we were sitting still in one place. Hearthstone, maybe,” I said absently, and Lesley threw a balled-up cocktail napkin at me.

“Call your mother,” she told me, so I did.

Lesley and I have been going to the same Muggle pub for years. It’s close to our flat, the beers are many, and the chips are by far the best I’ve had. Plus, it’s got WiFi, which is sort of a must when you’re a couple of Muggleborn wizards who do too much magic where you actually live to keep from blowing out a router every few weeks. We try to limit the amount of actual spellcasting we do in our flat—enough that we can have things like a television to watch the game on and my all-important video game consoles—but every so often it all goes tits-up anyway, and then it pays to have somewhere to go while you bemoan your sorry fate and try to figure out how to fix it.

Mum’s never been wild about the fact that since magic is mostly antithetical to technology, Hogwarts is basically Mount Doom for mobiles, especially since she thinks owls need better hygiene. When I got the new job, she made me promise to get somewhere with reception as often as I could. Calling your parents is very important in a family like mine, even if I mostly just made agreeable noises while she told me what all of my aunts and uncles and cousins were up to, until she finished with, “And your cousin Abigail is at that school of yours now, so her mum’s very pleased you’ll be able to keep an eye on her.”

“Oh, God, what,” I said, kneejerk, as I realized she meant Abigail _Kamara_ , Gryffindor headache, and that horror lasted me all the way through the rest of the conversation.

I finally managed to hang up, once I’d been suitably harangued, and put my mobile down with some regret. “So.”

“So,” Lesley agreed. “What the fuck is going on? Tell me everything.”

I did, which took a lot less time than I’d sort of expected it would. ‘Everything,’ upon the telling of it, turned out to be not that much—just a collection of bad feelings and weird looks. I felt a little like the boy who cried wolf or like a kid who’s convinced the bogeyman’s in his closet based on the sound of the radiator.

“Huh,” Lesley said, settling back in her seat once I was done. “That’s actually a bit worrying.”

“It is?”

“Yeah.” She drummed her fingers on the table a little, a nervous habit I thought she’d trained herself out of years ago. And then, to my total surprise, she shot her wand out of her sleeve under the table and started casting anti-eavesdropping spells. “Just in case, okay?” she said when she saw me looking. She finished up with some seriously fancy, seriously overkill stuff and sat back, holstering her wand again and crossing her arms. “Listen. I shouldn’t be telling you this, but I’m starting to worry about what I’ve gotten you into by convincing Seawoll to hire you. I don’t know why so many professors left at the end of last year, but I’m almost completely positive it has something to do with the Faceless Man.”

I didn’t quite yelp, but it was close. “The Faceless Man. Lesley. Like—he killed them?”

The Faceless Man was a Dark wizard the Aurors have been going after for years. He does really unbelievably gross stuff and gives magical experimentation a bad name, especially since one of his primary areas of interest seems to be turning people into things—and not in the reversible Transfiguration way. Lesley came back from a raid on one of his places once, threw up in the toilet, and then cried for about half an hour while I made tea and awkwardly stroked her hair.

He was seriously, seriously evil. I’d never had any interaction with him, a state of affairs I was pretty invested in maintaining, and the fact that Lesley _had_ made my blood run cold and had me wanting to do something manly and stupid, like protect her.

“No,” Lesley said quickly. “No, I’m pretty sure—I’m almost completely positive they’re not dead; there’s no way the Ministry could actually get away with covering that up. They’d have to reveal it eventually.”

“Oh. Yeah. Thank God.” I took a long drink of my beer and tried not to visibly panic. “So, they’re, uh, what? Terrifying chimera?”

“I don’t know, I said.” But I noticed she didn’t actually deny the possibility this time.

I leaned forward, keeping my voice down despite the spells she’d cast. “And this is the guy you’re going undercover with?”

She darted a quick look around, but we were in a Muggle pub at two in the afternoon, just some ethnic guy and his perky blonde girlfriend, and the only person even looking our way was a dark-skinned girl the next table over. Considering how posh her clothes looked, I figured she was slumming it and getting an eyeful of how the other half lived. Besides, if someone had been snooping, I didn’t think they’d get much of anything. Even in school, Lesley was favorite for doing secrecy magic. “Yes, if I can make it work,” she said.

“Are _you_ in danger?”

I saw her hesitate, but finally she shrugged and hissed, “Probably. Now stop talking about it, Peter, you’re not even supposed to know.”

I let it go, but grudgingly, and it wasn’t something I was going to stop thinking about.

“About you,” she said, continuing like I wasn’t still having a heart attack imagining her with the Faceless Man, “you said the kids thought you were _harmless_?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Er. I mean, I am, pretty much.” Especially compared to Lesley and Bev, the two people I spent most of my teenage years with.

“Of course you are. But that means they thought you could’ve been—what, dangerous?”

I put my chin in my hand, interested. “Yeah, I had that thought too. That that’s what they might’ve been checking the new teachers for. Whether or not we were a threat.”

She frowned. “Does that mean the last teachers were removed by the Aurors because they were a danger to the school, not because the Faceless Man was a danger to them? Or maybe that’s just what your kids think. They are seventeen.”

I thought about it. “They were a danger. And the Faceless Man was involved. Does that mean they were working for him?”

Lesley blanched. It’s the kind of thing that’s obvious when you’re white, the way she went all pale and big-eyed. “That’s a very bad thought. Peter, if he had that many people in there, he’d have to have had a goal, and I bet you anything he’d want to get someone back in.” She blinked. “Which would explain why your two students would be so nervous about new professors. Any of the old ones, they’d have had to have been pretty thoroughly vetted when the Aurors were doing spring cleaning with the faculty. If I wanted to get someone in Hogwarts, I’d go for one of the new positions Seawoll had to fill, not one of the professors already there. He was in such a rush, I doubt he had time to really do proper background checks.”

“You did get someone in Hogwarts,” I said. “Me.”

She glared at me. “Do not take that as me encouraging you to play teenage detective. You do not make a good investigator.”

“I’m _twenty-five_. You’re not even older than I am!”

She ignored me. “Who’re the other new faculty members? You—”

“Mellissa Oswald, Dominic Croft, Varvara Tamonina, and Thomas Nightingale. Oswald’s Herbology, Croft’s Magical Creatures, Tamonina’s Transfiguration, and Nightingale’s Defense. Term’s just started so I don’t really know any of them that well, but it seemed like Sahra and Jaget’d already counted Dominic out. So, if we’re trusting their judgment—”

“And I don’t know why we would be,” Lesley muttered, but it seemed more reflexively contrary than anything else. Her brow was furrowed, and I don’t think she was really paying attention to what she was saying. “And the others? Is there anything about them that seems like it might’ve piqued the interest of someone looking?”

I thought about it. “I guess they’re all a bit…I don’t know. But if you were the Faceless Man and all your operatives had just been caught, wouldn’t you want someone who _wasn’t_ going to pique anyone’s interest?”

“They’re all a bit ‘you don’t know’?”

I made a face at her for deriding my perfectly reasonable descriptive choices and then tried to explain Mellissa and Varvara.

Lesley nodded, looking thoughtful. “I’ll see if I can swipe their Auror files. They’ve got to have ones on all the professors, considering. And—Nightingale?”

I shrugged, looking down. “He’s sort of…shifty.”

“Shifty.”

“Yeah. I mean, I’ve talked to him more than the other two, because, uh—anyway. And he’s… You always just sort of get the feeling he’s not telling you something. Maybe shifty isn’t the right word, actually. Cagey. He’s really cagey. Even when he’s being normal, I feel like he’s got a secret.” I paused. Lesley looked a million miles away, clearly turning what I’d just said over in her brain, and I couldn’t help adding, “But I don’t think he’s evil.”

She came back to the present and snorted. “ _Really_ ,” she said. “I wonder why.”

“No!” I snapped, a little offended. “Come on. Him being fit has not made me stupid.”

She looked at me and then nodded. “Okay. So why don’t you think he’s evil, if it’s not just that you want to fuck him?”

“Because of Seawoll,” I said, and I could tell I’d surprised her.

“Seawoll?”

“You trust his judgment, right?” I went on without waiting for her to respond. “And he’s definitely in the clear, because if the Ministry had to get rid of the old headmaster of Hogwarts and four other professors because they were working for a Dark wizard and general domestic terrorist, they’d have made bloody sure their new headmaster wasn’t. And he actually knows Nightingale. Not like he knows me, where he sort of remembers me being useless and hanging around with you a lot. He can’t stand the guy. Lesley, you should’ve seen him glaring at Nightingale when we showed up that first day—you don’t hate someone that much unless you know them pretty well. And if I was worried about evil wizards trying to work for me, I’d be a hell of a lot more suspicious of the ones I didn’t like, just because, unless I had a damn good reason to think that they were all right. Seawoll hates Nightingale, so he must really fucking trust him to give him the job at a time like this.”

“Huh,” Lesley said, and for a half-second I almost thought she looked impressed.

“Besides, he just doesn’t seem like someone who’s evil,” I said, instantly ruining it.

“Of course he doesn’t,” she muttered. “Look, Peter, that did actually make sense—or it did right up until the very end—but I just want to be sure you aren’t just seeing what you want to see. This is a bad time for a Hogwarts professor to be cagey.”

Lesley’s smarter than me when it comes to stuff like this, so I did her the courtesy of seriously considering it. “I think I’m good,” I said at last. “Not saying I’m not interested, but it’s just hormones and some fun conversations. I met him a week ago; I’m not exactly picking out the wedding china.”

She eyed me carefully, but I guess she could tell I was telling the truth, because she nodded briskly and said, “Okay, good. I’ll try to get access to the Auror files on all of them—Dominic Croft too, just in case your intrepid teenagers are wrong about him. I’ll let you know what I find.”

“I’ll keep an eye out,” I agreed. “On Dominic too, sure.”

“ _Carefully_.”

“Carefully,” I repeated dutifully. “You, too—be careful.”

“I’m not the one who gets in trouble,” she said, which was a filthy lie, but I let it slide.

We spent the rest of the day trying to talk about innocuous things, but I think we were both having some trouble with it. Eventually, we ended up just drinking quietly and sitting together as I thought things over. I traced absent patterns in the condensation on my pint, watching the rest of the pub: there were a few girls in a corner having a fight, a couple doing their level best to suffocate each other with their mouths, a group of students getting pissed, and a whole host of people just eating and having a drink and getting on with things. The posh girl at the next table over was still there and still alone, but she looked bored now, tearing at a paper napkin. I wondered why she bothered to stick around if she was done gawking at the wildlife, but when she got up, it wasn’t to leave but to grab another pint from the bar. I tracked her with my eyes absently, taking note of the fact that she was a lot taller than she’d looked sitting, 180 at least, but I averted my eyes when I realized what I was doing, hopefully before she noticed.

Eventually, Lesley and I couldn’t put off leaving any longer, not with another drink or a conversation about how the teaching was going or a story about what Lesley’s siblings were getting up to. When I finally got up to go out to the alley and Apparate back to Hogsmeade, we didn’t quite grip each other’s forearms and vow our eternal friendship while staring deeply into each other’s eyes, but with the way I saw Lesley biting her lip when she made me promise to write, it was probably a close thing.

Thank god for a stiff upper lip and a history of not dealing with our feelings, because I’m not sure I could’ve taken more emotions than just the tone of her voice when she told me to take care. I nearly hugged her anyway when I told her the same, and anything more would’ve just been embarrassing.

#

I did not take care, naturally, not exactly. In a move that probably would’ve made Lesley groan and call me an idiot who needed a minder, I went directly from Apparating back in Hogsmeade to Nightingale’s office, with a brief stop at mine to make sure everything still in progress was stewing correctly. The Potions lab is in the basement, though I can’t think why—without magical intervention, the fumes from anything brewing have absolutely nowhere to go, since there aren’t any windows. That makes any accidents about twice as hard to deal with, which is sensible British wizarding design at its finest. Defense is a couple floors up from that, so I had some time to think on the way.

It didn’t do me much good. I was still mentally justifying talking to Nightingale as ‘investigating’ and trying to figure out what to say when I knocked on the door. He called out an invitation to come in almost immediately. I stuck my head through, just to make sure he really was open to company, and practically bit my tongue off.

Curled up on one of his impressively comfortable looking armchairs was Molly, potentially immortal, definitely inhuman, and preternaturally frightening caretaker of Hogwarts. She’d been there the entire time I’d been a student, and from what I’d heard, for at least a good century and a half before that, too—except, bizarrely, for a couple of decades between the 1970s and 1990s, when she’d quit, disappeared, and then reappeared like nothing had happened. I’d never met anyone with the slightest idea where she’d gone for all that time or who wasn’t at least a little too terrified to try and figure it out.

Sitting at her feet was a small wire-haired terrier (probably not the same one she’d had the last time I’d been at Hogwarts, but I wasn’t ruling anything out), and across from her, in a chair of his own, was Thomas Nightingale. He’d glanced up at my entrance, but he looked completely relaxed in her company—which made one of us.

“Peter,” he said, looking surprised but not displeased to see me. Molly narrowed her eyes at me, and I had the sudden feeling I was about to get detention for being out after curfew, despite the fact that it was barely ten and I was a professor.

“Sorry,” I said, meeting Molly’s eyes steadily, because I was an adult and not prone to hiding in broom closets to avoid getting in trouble anymore, “I didn’t know you had company, Professor Nightingale. I don’t want to intrude.”

“You’re not intruding,” he said, sounding puzzled. “You remember Molly, surely. Molly, Peter Grant is teaching Potions now, as I’m sure you’re aware.”

Molly tilted her head in a way that might’ve been an answer if studied properly and rose to her feet in one smooth movement. I’m ashamed to say I started back a little and almost closed the door on my own nose. She looked unimpressed and made a hissing noise that I thought was directed at me for a horrifying moment, before I realized it was meant for the dog, which bounced to his feet and stood next to her, wagging its tail.

“Thank you for coming by, Molly,” Nightingale said, and he really did seem as though he meant it. “And thank you for bringing supper.”

I looked for the first time at the table between them and realized they must have eaten together, here in his rooms, which was unfortunately another tick in the ‘reasons why Thomas Nightingale is good-looking as hell but definitely not normal’ column. I’d have to tell Lesley.

“Do come in, Peter,” he added, waving me forward with one hand. I was only too happy to oblige, considering Molly was making directly for the door I was still standing in. I managed to nod at her fairly calmly, and she gave me a look that reminded me of my mum the time I’d tripped over my own feet during a growth spurt and fallen straight into my dad’s stereo system. She wasn’t sure I’d done any real damage, but she was definitely mad anyway, and how much trouble I was in remained to be seen.

“Nice to see you again,” I managed weakly, and she silently slipped out past me, dog trotting at her heels.

I looked back over at Nightingale to see him tidying up the remains of the supper with a couple neat flicks of his wand, and then he turned and met my eyes. “Peter. What can I do for you?”

“Do you _hang out_ with Molly?” I said, the words making no trips through my brain before appearing directly in my mouth.

He didn’t seem offended, though—and I doubt it was the first time he’d been asked, considering—and just said, “We’ve known each other a very long time, and we’ve always gotten along. So yes, I suppose I do.”

“Where did you meet her?” I said, which might seem like a stupid question, but I was slowly putting together two and two and getting negative one.

He just gave me a very patient look and said, “Where do you think?”

And it should’ve been obvious, because like I said, Molly is a Hogwarts institution. Except, right, for those couple decades in the back half of the twentieth century. Now, I wasn’t exactly sure how old Nightingale was, and it would’ve been a little weird to ask, but he _looked_ the age to have gone to school right about then. Which would’ve meant that his student experience should’ve been distinctly _sans_ mystical housekeeper.

I almost opened my mouth to say so, but I remembered at the last second that that would probably fall under what Lesley would categorize as ‘not being careful,’ and instead just said, my mind still mulling that conundrum over, “Right, of course. Sorry, Professor.”

He gave me an odd look. “Peter,” he said, “would you prefer that I call you ‘Professor Grant’?”

I made a reflexive grimace that I couldn’t have hid if I’d been trying. “Not really.”

“Then I can’t figure out why on earth you would be calling me that instead of by my name.” I must have gaped at him, because he huffed out a breath and said, “You know, you assured me not long ago that you don’t think I’m old, but I’m starting to doubt that.”

“I don’t think you’re old,” I said immediately. “Uh…”

“Thomas,” he said patiently.

“Thomas,” I repeated, and he smiled at me.

Which sounds like not a big thing and definitely not like something that warranted what happened directly following, but you have to understand: I realized right at that moment that Thomas Nightingale didn’t smile very much. Oh, he’d grinned a few times, and sometimes I think I’d said things that’d amused him, but a proper smile, a real smile, a smile where he just looked happy—that I’d never actually seen before. Not until right then.

And fuck, but it looked good on him.

At the back of my head, I could distinctly hear my thoughts going, _Oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck_ , as they ran directly into that smile and fell over. When I’d said to Lesley that my interest in him was just hormones and garden variety need-to-get-laid syndrome, I’d meant it, but I could practically _feel_ that interest sharpening to a point and floating up somewhat to stab me directly in the heart.

I really hate having crushes, especially at an age where I’m supposed to be legally an adult and basically emotionally mature and capable.

“Uh,” I said, coherently, and in a way definitely designed to hide my sudden and massively gay attack of feelings.

“Not if you’d rather not, of course,” he said, the smile fading a bit at the edges.

“No, I’d like to,” I said quickly, because I would, and because I hoped saying so might bring it back. “It’s just the, uh. Gravitas. I told you that you were more professor-y than me.”

“Yes, I’m sure,” he said, not quite rolling his eyes

“You really, really are. Everyone else in my life agrees that I’ve got about as much gravitas as a plastic spoon, so I’m not sure why you’re resisting.” I took a deep breath to fortify myself and finished, “Thomas.”

I didn’t get another smile, but he did look pleased. “I think you sell yourself short,” he said.

I thought I sold myself about right, actually. It’s not that I don’t have skills, because I do and plenty of them. It’s just that looking impressive has never been said to be one. I just shook my head, though, because some people don’t get that being honest about your shortcomings doesn’t count as talking yourself down. “This isn’t actually why I came by.”

“Of course,” he said, blinking and gesturing for me to take Molly’s chair. “Did you need something?”

“Not exactly. Well, sort of,” I said, extremely clearly, as I sat down. It really was a comfortable seat, as long as I didn’t think too hard about the fact that I was pretty sure the plate in front of Molly had been filled with chunks of raw meat. “You used to be MLE, right?”

He was still standing, his back to me as he finished waving a few things onto shelves on the other side of the room, so I had a pretty good view of the way his spine went abruptly rigid. He turned around slowly. “I don’t remember saying anything of the sort,” he said, and his voice was mild, but that couldn’t hide that first reaction, or his hand, which I glimpsed right before he slid it into a pocket, clenched into a fist so tight his knuckles were white.

“You didn’t,” I said carefully, as my brain started churning up about a million reasons for that response, each more absurd than the last. “But I’ve got a friend in the Aurors. Seawoll offered her the job first, and she says he only lets people teach Defense if they’ve spent some actual time defending, so I assumed.”

“Ah.” I could see his shoulders slump as he relaxed a bit. His hand came out of his pocket and settled, somewhat calmly, on the back of the chair in front of him, though one of his fingers twitched a little, rubbing the woodwork. He watched me for a second, and then he said, “As a matter of fact, yes, I was. I don’t tend to advertise the information, however, and I’d prefer if you’d keep it to yourself as much as possible.”

“Okay,” I said dubiously. I tried to keep as much attention on his body language as I could, because I was pretty sure this kind of weirdness was exactly what I was supposed to be looking out for. “I don’t have a problem with that. But, um—why?”

He hesitated. I wondered if he was coming up with a clever lie or just bracing himself to tell me something hideously embarrassing, like he’d flunked out. Maybe Lesley was right, and that really was why Seawoll hated him. “With a career like one in Magical Law Enforcement,” he said, “people tend to assume you have a variety of interesting or violent stories to tell. I’ve never found—that is, most of my stories, I’d either rather not relive, or I’m not allowed to tell them in the first place. It’s—I find it simpler if people don’t know to ask for them in the first place.”

It was a decent answer, but not really good enough to explain how he’d just reacted. Either his job as a member of MLE had been a level of classified comparable to the work of James bloody Bond, or he had a pretty bad—and probably undiagnosed—case of PTSD. Or he was lying.

“Fair enough,” I said, because agreeing with people tends to get you more information than saying you’re onto them. “I wasn’t going to ask you for stories, but I can still piss off if you’d rather.”

He shook his head. “Not at all, I was simply surprised. Since you weren’t after tales of what I did in the line of duty, what were you looking for?”

“Oh.” I took a moment to remember. “Oh, I was just wondering—well, my friend in the Aurors, she’s, uh. She does some pretty dangerous stuff. And I worry about her. So, I’ve been, uh, trying to—I’d like to be able to do something that could help her, but it’s hard, since I’m not an Auror, and I can’t help her in a normal way. I’ve been sort of, in my spare time, trying to develop potions or other stuff that could help? She’s always saying that the Aurors don’t have a lot of technological support, and it’s not like I think I can be Q, but—”

I saw him frown, so we had to take a quick break for me to explain James Bond.

“All right,” he said, once I think he’d gotten the gist. “But what are you expecting me to do? I’m hardly, ah, inventive. Or terribly intellectual, to be perfectly honest.”

He looked a little embarrassed about it, and I bit my tongue on telling him that frankly, I’d assumed as much. Not that he seemed stupid, but Aurors aren’t exactly a bunch of big thinkers. According to Lesley, intellectual curiosity was considered a personality flaw to be stomped out, with prejudice, by your commanding officer. Thank God I’d never considered trying to be a magical copper; I can’t see that going well at all.

“No, I just thought you might be able to tell me what would be useful,” I said instead. “I’d ask my friend, but she’d just tell me to stop being a prick and to not worry about her.”

“I see,” he said. “That’s very admirable.” I must’ve looked confused, because he added, “Trying so hard to take care of your friend.”

Only he paused ever so slightly before he said friend, and my mind followed that immediately to the fact that my wanting so badly to help take care of Lesley might not look totally platonic from an outside, potentially heteronormative perspective into my life. Not that—I mean, I like girls. But when there’s a guy and he loves a girl, people tend to make assumptions about _how_ he loves her, and while those assumptions might’ve been true when we were in school, Lesley and I were well past that.

“Not a friend like that,” I said, too quickly. “Just a normal friend. My best friend, but not a friend I’m interested in as anything other than a friend, if you understand what I’m saying. A friend who’s _only_ a friend and who I’d definitely prefer to stay in that only friendly category.”

He looked for a second like he wanted to laugh, but he didn’t, just nodded solemnly and a bit like he might be teasing me. “I stand corrected. A friend who is absolutely not filling any other role in your life.”

“Right. Yeah, that’s—right.”

He didn’t seem to care much whether or not she was my girlfriend, but I definitely cared that he knew she wasn’t. And if I was unlucky, which was pretty normal for me, he’d work that out, on account of it being incredibly fucking obvious. Lesley calls that a ‘context clue,’ except according to her, the context is my entire face.

“Well, in that case,” Thomas said. “Yes, I think I might be able to help you. Perhaps you could tell me what you’ve been working on, and I could try to guide you in the direction of what would be easiest to use or most relevant in the field?”

I sagged in relief. “Yes, thank you, that’s exactly what I want. You’re brilliant.”

“Not at all.” His gaze went a little far away, staring over my shoulder at something I had a feeling was several years and a lot of nostalgia distant from me. “But I do enjoy supporting brilliance.”

#

 _Your Nightingale was definitely in MLE_ , I read in my Lesley notebook a few days later, _and you’re right, he wasn’t useless._

I read the message over and then pushed my grading—third years, the twelve uses of dragon’s blood—to the side of my desk and pulled the notebook closer. _How do you know?_

_I told you I was going to try and swipe everyone’s files, remember? Only I’m sure as hell not getting Nightingale’s for you, because it’s so unbelievably classified I’d probably get hauled up on charges if I got caught in the same room as it. That is NOT NORMAL._

_Upside_ , I wrote, _it probably means they know a lot about him, right? So far, that doesn’t sound very evil._

 _Yes and no._ There was a brief pause in the writing, but I could tell she was still thinking from the tiny ink drops where she gently tapped her quill against the page. _When I said it wasn’t normal, I really meant it. Normal Aurors who go undercover or are part of ongoing investigations or whatever—parts of their files are classified. Aurors who specialize in deep cover, most of their file might be classified and held in a secure location. Your Nightingale’s, though, even the REFERENCE NUMBER is classified. The only reason I know the file exists at all is because someone missed a redaction in a document about the background checks on the new Hogwarts professors. It requires a level of clearance so high and so specific I bet there’s maybe five people in the department who could read it._

I read that over maybe three times, trying to figure out what to say. Finally, mostly because I was still processing, but I could feel Lesley’s impatience like she was right in front of me, I wrote, _He’s not my Nightingale._

_No, but you want him to be. And I can’t believe that’s what you got out of that._

_It’s not, but I’m still thinking. Hold on a second._  I rubbed my forehead, trying to consider the facts rationally and not with the part of my brain that liked Thomas’s smile. He’d said, hadn’t he, when I’d asked him about being an Auror, that most of his stories he wasn’t allowed to tell.  _What the hell gets a file that classified?_

_That’s what I’m saying, I don’t know. I’ve never seen anything like this before. Something very, very big. But... Peter, I want you to be careful of this guy._

I frowned. Lesley’s occasionally cautious, but not paranoid and not usually willing to admit to being worried about me. _Okay, sure, but why? So his file’s classified—it still means the Aurors probably know more about him than any of the rest of us. They wouldn’t let him teach here if the file were classified because he was evil._

 _Yes,_ she wrote, _but as far as I can tell, he also hasn’t worked here in a while. Like at least ten or fifteen years, and that means, judging by how old you said he was, he quit pretty young. People who do stuff as big as he must’ve and burn out that fast_...She started writing and scratched the letters out a couple of times. _I’m saying this job can be shitty, and it can do some pretty fucked up stuff to your head. Whoever they thought he was, he might not be that person anymore._

I wanted to pretend, at least to myself, that I didn’t believe her, but I did. It takes a lot less than fifteen years to become someone you can’t recognize. I’ve seen people—hell, I’ve seen my own father—get lost in any number of things: drugs, debt, other people, their own heads. And that’s without the kind of trauma Lesley was suggesting Thomas might have gone through. I thought about the way he smiled, or didn’t smile, and decided I didn’t like that idea much either.

But, as always, just because I didn’t like it didn’t mean Lesley wasn’t right.

 _Peter?_  she wrote in the notebook, and I realized she’d been waiting for me to respond.

 _Still here,_  I said. _I’ll be careful. What about the others? Varvara and Mellissa? And Dominic too, I guess._

She didn’t respond for a bit, and I could tell she wanted to talk about Thomas some more, but in the end, she wrote, _The only reason I can think of not to trust Croft is that he works with magical creatures and so does TFM. His file’s all right. He used to work for some wildlife protection programs, mainly in cities, rescuing creatures being kept as pets that really shouldn’t have been and kicking arse at bad zoos and the like. Honestly, unless it’s all a clever ruse—possible—I bet he’d hate Faceless. But he’s got a good record, no mysterious gaps, everything in order. It’d be better than your file if you didn’t live with an Auror who could vouch for you._

I grinned. _Thanks, Lesley._

_You owe me. Varvara Sidorovna Tamonina and Mellissa Oswald are a bit worse. Oswald’s, I sort of have to wonder if they even TRIED, there’s so much information missing. She keeps bees, she’s Hugh Oswald’s granddaughter, they’ve got her previous address and a few names of friends, but they haven’t even got her parents’ names. The file’s so thin it might as well not exist._

Worrying, but I couldn’t help but think she also had someone to vouch for her. _Maybe they thought being Professor Oswald’s granddaughter put her in the clear. They must’ve checked him out pretty thoroughly after last year._

 _It’s either lazy work or incredibly shady or a mix,_ she wrote back, apparently not convinced.

I sighed and stretched my back out, missing the days when I thought the worst thing waiting for me in this castle was Abigail Kamara. _Okay, so I’ll be careful of her too. Varvara?_

_Better than Oswald’s and Nightingale’s, worse than yours and Croft’s. At least it’s all there to be read, but it looks like she bounced around a lot and did a lot of different things. They had trouble getting hold of some of her references, but that’s not necessarily surprising, considering how many different jobs she’s had. The weirdest part is that she’s mostly kept to short-term positions before now, it looks like, and Hogwarts is usually a career for people who want to stay there until they die. Habit-changing is a red flag, but she’s pretty clean otherwise._

It took me a while to read through all that, especially since Lesley’s handwriting was getting progressively worse the longer she had to do it. _So on the sliding scale of mysterious new teachers?_

_From worst to best? Nightingale, Oswald, Tamonina, Croft, you._

_Glad I’m bottom of the pack._

_It’s close. Your history of recent unemployment looks exploitable, but then there’s me. I’m carrying you._

_My knight in shining armor_ , I said, and I drew a couple hearts just to annoy her.

_Oh, fuck off. And try not to have sex with Nightingale!_

I sighed. He’d have to want to have sex with me for that to be a problem, but Lesley would only make fun of me if I told her that. _I’ll keep it in mind,_ I told her.

#

“All right,” Thomas said, leaning against one of the tables in my lab and crossing his arms over his chest. “What exactly is it you’d like from me?”

I tried not to think dirty thoughts in response to that, with only moderate success, and boosted myself up to sit on one of the stools, facing him. “Right, so—you used to be in the field. I mean, you caught criminals and all that.”

“Certainly I tried.”

“And things went wrong,” I ventured.

He looked amused. “All the time.”

“Like what? I mean, when you were totally fucked—uh, sorry, when you were in trouble—”

“I’m familiar with swear words,” he said dryly. “Very, in fact. Speak as you’d like.”

I grinned at him, feeling the stupid leftover tension about him thinking I was just a dumb, unprofessional kid fading away. There’s a point, sometime after you get out of school, when you realize that you can actually be friends with people who are twenty or thirty years older than you without it being weird—but you always have to make sure they’ve realized it too. “Yeah, Lesley says the Auror team all swear like sailors, so I guess you would be. In that case, when you were totally fucked, what was usually going wrong?”

“Usually would be the wrong word, I believe,” he said. “We had such a variety of catastrophes that I hardly know where to begin.” I must’ve looked disappointed or frustrated, because he smiled and said, “But generalities—all right. I suppose plans often went wrong because someone was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Or because someone hit a snag and was late or injured. Or dead.”

“Breakdown in communications,” I said, ignoring that last. “Right, okay.” Probably not something I could adapt my notebooks to, considering the scale and the need to have them work on the go, but it was totally unreasonable that nobody had invented magical comms yet. “That’s probably an extended project, considering I have no idea where to start—miniaturized Floo calls, maybe? But needing to rely on a fire staying lit while things are going wrong seems—”

“Overly optimistic,” Thomas finished for me, sounding dry. “Yes, I can’t see that going well.”

“Yeah.” I half-wondered if I could just adapt the Protean I’d used for the notebooks, since it had neatly solved one communications problem. If you could make something that would mimic the sound of anything it heard and then replicated the device exactly, would each duplicate mimic every sound? But then I realized that was absurd, because not only would you get a monstrous echo, like when someone’s forgot to wear headphones on a Skype call (my mother had discovered video calling and made sure, in no uncertain terms, that I had too), but it would be absurdly easy for an enemy to copy one themselves without anyone knowing. “Okay, putting a pin in that for now. Other general problems?”

“Meeting a better duelist? No, I apologize, I know that’s unhelpful.”

“Yeah, I don’t know if I can fix being bad at your job.”

He chuckled, and some incredibly stupid teenage part of me perked up at the sound. He brought one hand over his mouth like he was embarrassed to have demonstrated an emotion, but I could see the way his eyes crinkled up, gorgeously, at the corners. I grinned, unaccountably pleased.

“What about being unlucky?” he said, once he’d reassembled his stiff upper lip. He was still smiling back at me, though, which was more than good enough. I liked the way it looked on him. “That’s a problem we had all the time.”

I wanted to keep that expression on his face, so I didn’t even bother trying to get the conversation back on track. “Absolutely I can fix that. Didn’t you say you were loaded? Buy the materials, and I’ll start mass-producing Felix Felicis—unluckiness gone for good. Of course, the stuff’s habit-forming like you wouldn’t believe, but hey, you asked for it.” I spread out my hands to encompass the lab around us. “Consider this your local neighborhood drug den.”

He laughed properly then, short and abrupt and a little surprised. “That’s very accommodating of you, Peter. Of course, buying, selling, or using it in quantities above one dose is quite thoroughly illegal, but I think we could persuade the Aurors not to arrest themselves, don’t you?”

“Just what I was thinking,” I said cheerfully. “It’s not illegal unless the coppers say it is.”

“Well, I think my work here is done.” He stood up straight, as if he were going to leave, but he didn’t do more than shift his weight in the direction of the door. “Every problem I’ve had ever had on the job could probably have been avoided by being phenomenally lucky. The Aurors will be unstoppable.”

“Suddenly all the other wizards out there will suck at dueling?”

“I don’t think it’s capable of changing reality on quite that scale,” he said thoughtfully, and I spared a quick moment of gratitude that it wasn’t, because if it were, I’d probably be studying it obsessively for the rest of my life, trying to figure out how and why. It was already one of the most bizarre and frustrating potions I’d ever learned about, and I didn’t think I could handle it being any more unreasonably powerful. “More likely you happen to dodge at just the right moment, cast precisely the spell they weren’t prepared for, catch your wand with your other hand when they disarm you—all the things we strive for but never quite manage.”

That caught my interest, and I straightened up. “Is that a problem? Being disarmed?”

“Oh, frequently.” He shrugged, like the thought of being wandless in a firefight wasn’t completely terrifying. “Sometimes because you’ve damaged your arm, if I’m honest, but it’s also just a very good dueling strategy. I did have a friend once try to tie his wand to his hand so it couldn’t be removed.”

“Didn’t work?”

“They managed to reattach the limb eventually.”

I winced. “Noted—no trying to secure wands to body parts.”

“I wouldn’t recommend it, no.”

“But you do get disarmed, and then you’re fucked,” I said, leaning back and resting my elbow on the lab table next to me, putting my chin in my hand.

“Unless you’ve some particular facility with offensive wandless magic, yes, very much so.”

“And basically no one does, so that’s right out,” I agreed. “All right, what about an offensive potion? Those are pretty wandless once you’ve made them.”

He frowned. “Like a poison? I can’t imagine you’d have much success getting your opponent to drink one. Or are you suggesting something that could bolster you in some way?”

I had a sudden vision of creating some sort of ingestible Captain America serum, almost made the joke, and then realized there was no chance in hell he was going to get it. I shook my head. “Neither, actually. I was imagining more of a Molotov cocktail thing, only something you could carry around a little more easily.”

“A what?”

Right, no chemistry or television for good Purebloods. “Like a bomb. You do—”

“I know what a bomb is, Peter,” he said patiently. “You needn’t strain something condescending to my ignorance.”

“I’m not condescending,” I assured him quickly. “I just have a hard time remembering what translates and what doesn’t. Anyway, this would theoretically be a bit more like a hand grenade, I guess, but a potion. There’s plenty of chemicals that explode even before you add magic, so I guess the trick would be to make sure they didn’t until you wanted them to. And then you could throw a bomb at someone’s face. Useful?”

“Very. In fact, I can think of many instances when I would have loved to throw a bomb at someone’s face,” he said. “Not only might it have gotten me out of a tight spot, but I believe it would have been positively satisfying.”

I eyed him. “You know, I had you pegged as straight-laced and, I don’t know—”

“Boring?” he supplied dryly.

“—but between the car and the driving and the apparent affection for violence, I think I had you all wrong. You’re really more of a wild card, Rambo type, aren’t you?”

“I have no idea what Rambo is,” he said, “but I think I probably ought to be offended.”

“Flattered,” I said. “Definitely flattered. He’s a—you know what, I think if I tell you, you _will_ be offended. Just go with flattered instead.”

“Just like that, on your say so?”

I grinned at him. “Sure. Trust me, I’m smart.”

“So I’m learning,” he said, and a smile tugged at his lips as he looked at me. “All right. Consider me flattered.”

I’m not going to lie, I was surprised and weirdly pleased. “Yeah? Just like that, on my say so?”

“Why not? Apparently I’m a wild card.” I felt my smile stretch wide, and he got a look on his face like he might start laughing at any moment. “Surely that must extend to some impulsive decisions. This can be one of them.”

I tried not to find him stupidly charming and failed completely. “See?” I said. “I’ve got you dead to rights now.”

“Oh,” he said, looking amused, “I think I might still surprise you.”

“You don’t think I’ve got you figured out?”

“I hope not,” he said. “I’d hate to think I might get predictable—you seem the type to bore easily.”

Crushingly accurate, as it happened—Lesley always said it was why I had a problem with commitment and follow-through and being sympathetic for more than five minutes at a time. “Okay,” I admitted, “so you’ve got _me_ dead to rights. No surprises left for you.”

“I very much doubt that.” He got a gentle, teasing look on his face, and I started smiling almost before he said anything. “I haven’t even seen you blow anything up yet. I imagine explosions serve to break up the monotony.”

I laughed, hopping off the stool. “Did I tell you I’ve got an Erumpent horn?”

“Oh, Lord,” he said, closing his eyes and turning his face up to the ceiling as if praying for patience. “Peter, it’s a miracle to me that you’ve survived this long.”

“Don’t worry. I know exactly what I’m doing.”

I got a very dubious look for that. “Do you?”

“Nope,” I said cheerfully, and he sighed, but it sounded more laughing than long-suffering. “Not even a little bit.”

#

I was tapped to chaperone the students in Hogsmeade a couple weekends later, which, as I recalled from when I was a student, basically meant hanging out down the pub and keeping an ear out for any audible screaming. So in the fine traditions of my forebears, I ended up in the Three Broomsticks with Dominic, trying to figure out if I was likely to look like a knob if I ordered beer instead of something magic-exclusive. Abdul and Thomas were joining us eventually, but they’d gotten stuck sorting out a few fourth years who’d gotten involved in an ill-advised duel over something I didn’t want to know about. Varvara’d said she might drop by later, and Mellissa was staying up at the castle.

Me and Dominic settled at a table with a few extra seats, and I offered to go to the bar and order for the both of us while he saved seats. Hogsmeade is always busy weekends, since it gets mobbed by students and day-trippers and what all, and the Three Broomsticks is the one half-decent place to get a drink in the whole town, so there was a bit of a crush as I approached the bartenders. I got knocked by someone with a huge tray and stumbled into someone else, half-turned to apologize, and got a good look at who I was apologizing to.

For a second, I couldn’t work out why she looked familiar. It was the height that finally tipped me off—I don’t meet many women who can look me in the eyes. Something like alarm or surprise flickered over her face as we saw each other, and I knew she recognized me too and that she wasn’t happy about it. I tried to keep my face relaxed and open, like as far as I was concerned, I’d never seen her before, and said, “Sorry about that. Bit mad today, isn’t it?”

I could see just an instant of hesitation in her posture, and then it eased out, though I couldn’t tell if she bought my act or was just trying to throw me off. “Very. Not your fault, anyway, no need to apologize.”

I thought she was about to leave, then, could see her turning to end the conversation, so I grinned as brightly as I could and started talking. “Haven’t I seen you around somewhere before?” I said, mostly because I wanted to see how she’d react.

She was more prepped this time, though: there wasn’t so much as a blink. Which was its own kind of suspicious, because with most people, I think you’d get that ‘am I meant to remember this person’s name’ look of horrified panic. She did give me a good stare, face to body to back up, but I thought it was a little calm.

“Maybe,” she said. “I don’t think I recognize you, though. Are you sure it was me?”

Was I? She was a total stranger, someone I’d barely glanced at a few times while I was thinking about other things, so I probably shouldn’t have been. But no—as soon as I’d placed her, I’d known. Lesley says I don’t pay attention, but I’ve got a great memory for details. I would’ve bet my job, my lab, and my nonexistent good name that this was the same tall, posh woman I’d seen watching us at the pub two weekends ago while Lesley laid out how unbelievably fucked we both were.

I shrugged, keeping it casual, unconcerned. “Guess not. Are you a local? I might’ve bumped into you here before.”

“Oh, no, not me.” She smiled, just a little friendlier than I’d expect from a woman being asked her address by an unfamiliar man, but I reminded myself that she might just be naturally chatty and that I shouldn’t jump to conclusions. “I’m just up for the day, you know. Shopping. Though I’d forgotten how busy it would be on the weekends, what with all the students.”

“Better to come up during the week,” I said, testing.

“Oh, definitely, but work, you know.”

Now, that was by way of being a clever feint, because half the shops in Hogsmeade are only open weekends. Zonko’s and Honeydukes, for instance. They get their main traffic from the school and weekend day-trippers, and while this may be Britain’s largest all-wizarding settlement, that doesn’t mean a whole lot. We’re a small population. If all you want is a pint or a meal or even basic things like clothes or groceries or office supplies, stopping in the town center will carry you through no matter the day of the week. But if you want to shop at all those semi-famous little stores? I wouldn’t recommend anything but a weekend. Being open only on select days is practically a part of the attraction for tourists. It makes it exclusive, I’m told.

Now it’s possible she didn’t know all that, but it’s also possible she was just agreeing with whatever I said in an effort to make me go away. I was hoping for the second, and I thought it was more likely, because I’ve never met a Hogwarts student who didn’t know. The idea that everything is open only for them just cements their teenage belief that they’re the center of the universe. (This despite the fact that the shops are open every weekend, and we weren’t always allowed down.) But it also lessens the urge to try and sneak out if the sweet shop will be closed anyway, so the professors usually made well certain we were aware.

“Maybe you’ve just got one of those faces, then, if I’m not likely to have run into you here before,” I said, even though she very definitely did not, and I very definitely knew both that I’d seen her before and when. “Sorry about the confusion. And the collision.”

“No harm done.” Her eyes slid away from me, and so did her body language—but only for a moment before they snapped right back, and she smiled cheerfully.

Yeah, I thought. She wants me gone, but she doesn’t want me to know she wants me gone. Now, is that because she’s following me and doesn’t want to give me more time to remember her, or is it because she thinks I’m a creep hitting on her who she doesn’t want to antagonize? I didn’t think I looked that threatening, at least not to a woman who wasn’t white and was therefore less likely to be threatened just by my skin tone, but then, I’m not a woman, and I suppose I’ve no idea how I’d come off to one. It’s a bit weird to ask strangers, and people who already know you can’t tell.

If she really was just a normal woman who thought she was dealing with normal unwanted attention, I was going to feel unbelievably bad about all this, but I didn’t think so. And in any case, I was rating the possible safety of me and an entire school full of children a bit higher than her personal comfort, because the possibilities in her being actually suspicious were officially, according to Lesley, incredibly dangerous. So I stuck out my hand and said, “Peter Grant, by the way.”

As I hoped, she shook. “Awa Shambir.”

When you give people your surname, they generally give you theirs too, because of social conditioning teaching us to fit into the herd. Thank god all that feelings stuff about marching to the beat of your own drum has never really caught on. I made a mental note of the name and said, “Is it nice to be back on the old patch? How long’s it been since you left school?” I even gave my own graduation year, which, again, meant she had to give hers. And then I took a chance, did something with a high likelihood of coming back to bite me in the arse, and said, gesturing back to where I’d left Dominic, “The boyfriend was a bit ahead of me, though, we didn’t meet until we were out. Isn’t it weird how you can live in the same building as someone and still not recognize them when they chat you up in the pub years later?”

I mentally sent out a prayer for forgiveness from both Dominic and his real boyfriend, and then I watched for the ‘oh, thank god, he’s gay and taken, not trying to pull’ expression. I flatter myself that I don’t get it much—but instead the much more ego-inflating ‘why are all the good ones gay and taken’ variation when I’ve got a boyfriend—but that doesn’t mean I’ve never seen it before, on those rare occasions I’m actually both dating a man and talking to strange women.

I didn’t get it from Awa, though, not even a flicker, and I was looking closely. She did glance back at Dominic and frown for the barest instant, but it looked like confusion, not relief or even disappointment. Like maybe she was wondering why I was still talking to her if I wasn’t trying to chat her up. Or maybe like she knew for some reason that I didn’t have a boyfriend and was wondering why I was making one up.

Because she was following me.

I felt my heart rate ratchet up, even as I tried to explain to myself that that was insane. Why would anyone be following me? Even if she were working for the Faceless Man, he shouldn’t have had any interest in me whatsoever. He should’ve barely known I existed, except as a teacher he hadn’t suborned. I tried not mentally add ‘yet’ to the end of that last thought and reflected that sometimes an overactive imagination does me no favors. I kept my smile up, trying to keep it relaxed and genuine.

She agreed that it was odd, gave her own graduation year—a few years past mine—and said yes, it was nice to be back.

I noted the year, fixing it in my mind. “We might’ve come across each other at school, then. Maybe that’s where I thought I knew you from.”

“Maybe.” Her eyes flicked back and forth, looking for a convenient escape, confirming that the Dominic gambit had utterly failed to change her perspective on the conversation.

“I was Ravenclaw,” I said. “You?”

She hesitated. “Hufflepuff.”

Which surprised me and almost had me convinced I’d read the situation all wrong. It might be a stereotype that Hufflepuffs are the least likely shady bastards on the planet, but whether by nature or nurture, it seems mostly true. But then on the other hand, Thomas was a Hufflepuff, and Lesley thought he was the shadiest bastard of them all, so I screwed my courage to the sticking place and kept on trying to get information from her—any information.

I barely managed to stop myself from asking if she was here alone, which would’ve tripped this conversation from a bit too friendly well over the line to definite predator. Instead I made small talk about how she was finding the village and indicated a gap in traffic where we could stand at the bar waiting to be noticed by someone who’d take our orders, thereby neatly creating an excuse to keep standing with her and making conversation that was basically normal. She was vague on Hogsmeade in general—odd—but willing to talk beer and how heinous the wait was. I did ask if she was up from London, and she agreed she was, but that didn’t mean much, London being the haystack to end all haystacks.

And it did not make it any more likely that I’d see her at a Muggle bar there and then again here two weeks later.

The only other interesting thing I got out of her was a glimpse of her wand as she used it to clean up a bit of butterbeer someone spilled on her sleeve. It was beautiful and not in the way wands usually are—more sort of unfinished, like an organic thing instead of something you’d got in a shop. The wood was a bit different too: pale, but speckled and striped with dark bits that looked like little holes and canyons when I focused. I told her it was bloody fantastic and asked what it was made of, and she smirked and told me it was spalted tamarind. And then she got a look on her face like she wished she hadn’t.

So naturally I kept asking. “That’s not an English wood, is it? I’ve never known any makers here to get creative with materials. Where’d you get it?”

“It was in the family,” she said, “from before we came over.” But I could tell she wished I’d never brought it up.

Eventually our drinks did come, and I had to scramble for excuses to keep her talking to me—I did ask her to come sit with us, desperately coming up with schemes to make Dominic pretend to be my boyfriend and then explain why to him afterwards. But it was in vain, because she thanked me and said she’d love to, but she had people to catch up with and it was so nice to meet but she really must be going. And then she scarpered, and there was nothing I could do about it short of actual kidnap, which I was reluctant to escalate to at that point.

I walked back to Dominic slowly, thinking, and slid into the seat he’d saved for me, pushing his pint across the table to him.

“That took a bloody age,” he said good-naturedly. “Saw you chatting. I don’t mind if you want to fuck off to make friends; the others’ll be here soon enough.” He grinned, and I could tell what kind of friend he thought I was trying to make.

“Nah,” I said. “Just ran into someone from London, that’s all.”

“Huh. Small world.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Very small.”

#

When I got back to the castle, I went straight to the library. Harold Postmartin was still there, because Harold Postmartin is always there. There’s nothing he loves more than his books. I swear he’d sleep there if he could. I found him easily enough, and he was agreeable when I asked if I could have a quick look at some old school records.

“Anything you’re looking for in particular, Peter?” he asked as he opened the door.

I’d had some time to think about it on the way, so I think I sounded pretty natural when I said, “My friend’s been writing me about someone we apparently used to know at school, but I don’t remember her at all. I feel a bit bad, considering, and I know I’d get teased mercilessly if I admitted it, so I thought I’d just exercise faculty privilege and try to refresh my memory by looking at whatever we’ve got.”

Postmartin laughed. “You wouldn’t be the first. Your year, then?”

“Uh, maybe,” I said and tried to look embarrassed and self-effacing. “Honestly, I _think_ maybe she was a bit younger, but I could be totally wrong.”

“I’ll just give you the ones for all the years around yours, shall I? Just in case she was older after all.” He gave me a cheerful looking smile, and since that was exactly what I’d wanted, I was able to give him an absolutely genuinely grateful look in response.

“Thanks, sir.”

He waved me off. “No need for that now, Peter. We are coworkers after all. Happy to help, and you really ought to start calling me Harold.”

I couldn’t quite imagine calling someone who’d been working here when I’d been at school by their first name—and I couldn’t help but think that Seawoll, for instance, wouldn’t particularly want me to—but I didn’t think it was worth the argument either. I mentally resolved to just stop calling him anything, the way I’d used to with my white friends’ parents. It’s surprisingly easy to never use someone’s name in conversation, ever.

He loaded me down with documents and folders and boxes—oh, how I wished that the magical world could digitize someday, or at least that someone would invent a magical equivalent—and set me up with a back room and a table where I could spread out. I tendered my extreme gratitude for saving me from humiliation and bad manners; he clapped me on the back and wished me the best of luck.

School records aren’t the most in depth dossiers in the world, but unless she had an MLE file—which I’d definitely be asking Lesley about later—they were the best I was going to get. I went straight to the graduation year she’d given me, Hufflepuff, paging through each entry as quickly as possible to get to hers.

Then I did it again, more slowly.

Then Slytherin, Ravenclaw, Gryffindor; then every single graduating class within five years of mine; then all of it again. It was an hour before I gave up completely, sitting back in my chair and wishing like hell that Hogwarts made students take ID photos so I’d have a visual record to look through. It didn’t matter, though.

There was no record of an Awa Shambir anywhere near my age having gone to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, ever.


	2. Chapter 2

I was stupidly jumpy all the next week or two, which I tried to pass off as general nerviness over the fact that three of my seven class years were wrapping up projects and basically hounding my office hours. And I’ll admit that that wasn’t doing much to help with the tension, but suddenly ‘am I a good teacher’ stress was taking a backseat to the ‘am I going to get murdered’ variety. It didn’t seem to matter if I knew it was stupid. Hogwarts has great security, and the idea that I would personally be a particular target of the Faceless Man was either paranoid or self-centered in the extreme, but I still found myself checking around corners for Awa.

Not that I could explain that very well, since all the proof I had that anything weird was going on at all was one deeply weird interaction with a woman in a Hogsmeade bar who might’ve been just trying to let me down easy and the suspicions of a couple of seventeen-year-old kids. That knowledge didn’t help much—I like to be doing things, but I didn’t really have anything to investigate while Lesley swore at me over needing to go in to search MLE files _again_ , so I coped by focusing on the stuff I could control. Like explosive potions.

“Hey, Thomas,” I said, when he and Abdul sat down next to me at dinner in the Great Hall. On my other side, Varvara and Dominic broke off their conversation just long enough to smile and say hello, before going right back to how exactly the Forbidden Forest helped to maintain the borders of castle security and exactly how impossible it was to navigate. (The answer, for the record, is very.)

“Peter, hello,” Thomas said, settling down into what was becoming his usual seat on my left, Abdul taking the chair on his other side. “I had to take points from a third year Ravenclaw today for creating explosions in the hallways. You may have a spiritual successor.”

I made a face at him, and he smiled a little bit. “Yeah, about that,” I said. “I mean, not about the kid, good for them, and how dare the administration stifle student academic achievement like this—”

He laughed softly, his eyes warm and dancing with amusement.

“—but about creating explosions.”

“Do I want to know what you’re talking about?” Abdul said, filling his goblet with water.

“I’m helping to create opportunities for grievous bodily harm,” I told him, and he sighed.

“Naturally you are. May I ask why you couldn’t turn your talents elsewhere? Last I checked, Thomas didn’t need any help creating grievous bodily harm. I’m told he has a talent.”

Thomas tensed slightly, frowning at him. Abdul caught the expression, and for a second, they had a wordless conversation of Thomas looking unhappy and Abdul looking a little apologetic.

Feeling daring, I nudged Thomas’s knee under the table with mine. He turned to meet my eyes, his face tight and closed off, and I nudged him again. “I don’t really care how good you were at your job,” I told him gently. Lesley probably did, but I was starting to come down on the PTSD side of things, while trying very hard not to think about the evil possibility. And if I was right, the last thing I wanted to do was make him talk about it with me, someone very much not trained in being helpful. “Unless you think you were the only Auror who ever had problems explosions could’ve solved. I definitely care then, because it means this a stupid thing to be wasting my time on.”

He looked distinctly uncomfortable, and then he sighed, sounding relieved. “Thank you,” he said, very quietly and very sincerely. “And, ah, no—I think many of my old coworkers would’ve very much enjoyed having an explosion at hand.”

“Great,” I said, trying to imbue the word with a certain amount of enthusiasm. I grinned at Abdul, who smiled back. “See? I’m being very helpful.”

“I’m sure you are,” he said. “And thank goodness for that. I personally feel that what the wizarding world needed is to have enough bombs to match the Muggles.”

He had a point—one which I, of course, ignored. “Anyway, Thomas—”

“You had something I could help you with,” he finished for me, leaning forward. “By all means, Peter. I’d love to assist.”

I reminded myself sternly that he was probably eager to help because I was working on behalf of his old people, not because he particularly enjoyed letting me pick his brain. “Yeah,” I said, leaning forward to match him anyway, on account of being an optimistic loser. “I was going to ask, how good do you think the aim of an average Auror is?”

“With spellcasting?” he said. He raised his eyebrows. “Very good, of course. We spend a good deal of time during training ensuring it.”

“Sure, I bet, and I’ll sleep safer at night knowing that such well-trained professionals are looking out for the innocent.” He gave me a _Really, Peter_  look, which I didn’t dignify with a response. “I meant with throwing things, though.”

“Oh. Yes, of course you did.” He frowned thoughtfully. “I’m afraid I’ve no idea. You’d be surprised how rarely it came up.”

“Okay,” I said. “How’s yours?”

“Excellent.”

“Great, so—”

“I may, however, not be indicative,” he said, sounding almost apologetic.

“You’re some kind of ball-throwing savant, aren’t you,” I said, trying and failing to inject a note of displeasure into my voice. I couldn’t even be surprised—he was fucking good at everything, wasn’t he? Which was doing wonders for my crush, of course.

Abdul snorted. “You’re more right than you know.”

Thomas smiled a little. “What Abdul means is that I used to play Quidditch for Hufflepuff while I was at school here. Chaser, in point of fact.”

“Fuck’s sake, Thomas,” I said, trying for exasperated in a bid to hide the fact that I was now imagining him in a Quidditch uniform. Yellow wasn’t his color, but the things always looked good no matter what. Something about the knowledge that they meant the person wearing them was sweaty and athletic underneath, probably. “Are you good at everything?”

He shook his head, but I thought he might’ve been—maybe, possibly, just slightly—a little flushed. Like he was blushing. Or something. He was definitely smiling. “I wouldn’t have the foggiest idea how to build a magical hand grenade, so you have me beat there.”

“Yeah, okay,” I said, pretending to be annoyed. “I think you’re just saying that. I think if I gave you the Erumpent horn, you could blow up anything you wanted.”

“Well, with an Erumpent horn, who couldn’t,” Abdul muttered. “There’s a reason they’re a Class B Tradeable Material, and you know, I don’t think they’re meant to be kept in schools.”

“Hmm,” Thomas said, looking right at me and apparently not paying attention to that. “You know what I’m very terrible at?”

“This ought to be good,” I said. “Wait, no, you’re posh—you can’t cook, can you?”

He blinked. “Actually, that’s true. I can just about make a cup of tea and reheat leftovers, and after that, I’m afraid the kitchen is a mystery to me. Does that make you feel any better, or is your ego still wounded?”

“Now you’re just being patronizing.”

“Well. Yes.”

“Bastard,” I said, but I was laughing. “All right. What were you going to say, before I exposed your deeply embarrassing inability to fend for yourself?”

“On the contrary, I can acquire takeout very competently.” I rolled my eyes at him, leaning into the clearly childish turn this conversation had taken, and enjoyed his subsequent exasperation. “But as a matter of fact, I was going to say that the entire field of magical theory is a something of a mystery to me.”

I stared at him. “You know, I’ve a feeling you’ve got to teach some of that.”

“Have I? My God, Peter, I don’t know what I’d do without you to point these things out to me.”

My _Really, Thomas_ wasn’t quite as good as his, but I like to think I had the fundamentals down well enough for it to land with feeling. It made him chuckle, at least, which was what I’d been going for. “Seriously,” I said, “what do you do when you’re not just showing them how to cast spells and reminding them that the world is full of dangerous wizards who’ve received the same education in violence as they’re getting right now?”

“I do the reading.” He leaned back in his chair, sipping at some of the wine we had at the staff table, since as professors we weren’t forced to be always downing pumpkin juice. “Some of the questions they come up with, especially the first years, I have to admit that even the experts in the field don’t know the answers to—”

“Yeah, the sheer number of things we don’t know about magic is sort of horrifying.”

“—but in general, I can get fairly far with short-term memorization and rote regurgitation.” He swirled the liquid in his cup, and his eyes darted towards my face. “Do you think that’s a poor strategy?”

I remembered all of a sudden that he had as much experience teaching as I did, no matter how casually confident he came off as most of the time. I’d said he had gravitas, and he did, but it still shouldn’t have been surprising to find that he was just as clueless as I was—just maybe more nervous about admitting it. “Hey,” I said, trying to inject as much reassurance into my voice as possible, “if you can successfully teach yourself seven years worth of magical theory in time to trick your students into thinking you’re on top of it, that’s kind of impressive all on its own. I don’t know if this can count as something you’re bad at.”

Actually, if he thought he sucked at magical theory, he was probably right. That knowledge really should’ve been doing its bit to dampen my crush on him, since the obvious corollary of me being attracted to competence was that a demonstrated lack usually served to cool my jets a bit. So it was really a pity that I mostly just wanted to put a comforting hand on his shoulder, rub the back of his neck with my thumb, and then kiss him for a while. Apparently, the ego boost of being definitely, entirely, without a doubt better than him at something was enough to keep me feeling good about my inappropriate workplace wish-it-were-a-romance. Besides, there was the bit where he was hot like you wouldn’t believe—I had a feeling that was having an effect.

“How kind of you, Peter,” he said, voice mild, but we locked eyes for a second, and I’d swear he looked relieved. “That barely sounded like a lie until the very end.”

“It’s mostly true,” I protested, and then I realized a full second after the words had already made their way of my mouth that it was. All right, so he wasn’t, say, me—but I’d a feeling he might still be ahead of the average layperson. “You’re learning it, you’re teaching it—all right, so you won’t be discovering the thirteenth use of dragon’s blood any time soon, but how bad at it can you actually be?”

“I suppose I’ve just never really understood the point,” he admitted, with an air of a man revealing an embarrassing medical problem. “The magic works. What does the rest of it matter?”

I groaned. Just because Lesley says the same thing doesn’t mean I ever get used to hearing it—how people can just shrug and move on when they’re _doing magic_ and they have no idea how is one of the most mind-boggling things in the world to me. “That was physically painful,” I told him, half-serious and half just to tease. “I want you to know, hearing that made my soul shrivel up, just a little bit.”

“No need to be so dramatic.”

“Dramatic? I’m serious!” I leaned over the table so I could look past him. “Abdul—”

“Oh, I’m on Peter’s side,” he said with gratifying speed.

“Of course you are,” Thomas said, sighing.

“Hearing that was like what I imagine being tortured by the Spanish Inquisition would have been like,” he continued mercilessly. “When I die, if my sins are numerous enough, I imagine that my divine punishment will feel similar.”

“Oh, dear God,” Thomas muttered.

Abdul tutted at him. “If I understood one fraction of how medical magic worked, imagine how much I could do to progress it. Take Skele-Gro, for instance—”

“Oh, _please_ let’s take Skele-Gro,” I agreed fervently.

He nodded at me approvingly. “The stuff regrows bone, but does it work on flesh? Nerves? No. Do we understand how it does what it does so that we can apply the principles elsewhere? Of course not. And that’s absurd; even you have to agree to that, Thomas. If we can regrow a ribcage, why on earth can’t we regrow a lung or an eye?”

“Yes!” I said. “Thank you!”

“We’ve artificial eyes and such,” Thomas said, “so what does it matter? Oftentimes they’re even more functional than a true eye would be, though I admit they tend to be a bit more noticeable. But that’s only a problem in fairly specific situations.”

We both stared at him. “So when I kill him…” I said slowly.

“I’ll testify at your trial that it was in self-defense,” Abdul agreed. “No man could listen to this and emerge unscathed.”

“It works,” Thomas repeated, sounding slightly baffled. “All the rest is just academic, and it seems to me rather…well, inconsequential. If we can achieve the result, the how of it is somewhat extraneous, isn’t it?”

I groaned and let my head fall onto the table. “I’m going to need like five more drinks to help me cope with the fact that I still enjoy his company.”

Abdul reached across him to pat me comfortingly on the back. “I’m familiar with the feeling. At least you can drink.”

“Good point.” I turned my head to the side to see him better. “How did you manage it?”

“Reminding myself often that I’m right and he’s wrong takes a tremendous weight off the burden, I must say.”

“You’re both behaving very childishly,” Thomas said sternly, but I could see the crow’s feet starting to crinkle at the corners of his eyes.

“We’re not the ones who just dismissed the entire field of academic study—which is a fairly barren field, because we’re wizards and no one bloody cares—as extraneous,” I told him. “So I wouldn’t throw stones.”

He smiled properly, then. “All right,” he said, warm and amused. “Convince me otherwise.”

I sat up straight. “Oh, I’m going to. I’m going to hear you say, ‘Peter, you’re right,’ or I’m going to die trying.”

“Well, I could never accuse you of a lack of persistence, at the very least.”

“I’m going to wear you down,” I told him, glaring and tapping my fist against the table to make my point clear in as non-disruptive a manner as I could manage.

“Of that,” he said, “I have no doubt, Peter.”

#

Over the course of the first few months of classes, to my surprise, I did fall into something of a routine, which just goes to show that the human brain can decide anything is normal if you do it often enough. The guy who was always wrestling crocodiles probably sighed and got a coffee on his way out the door to go to work, just like anybody else. Even trying to teach magic to children aged eleven through eighteen at a bloody castle in the middle of rural Scotland with an honest-to-God lake monster and the threat of imminent peril from an ethically challenged wizard—not to mention keeping an eye out for possible stalkers who like to lie about their names, ages, or both—can start to feel like a day job eventually.

Not that I was getting a whole lot of signs of the imminent peril since my encounter with the woman probably not named Awa Shambir (Magical Law Enforcement having turned up as much bugger all as Hogwarts). In fact, I was starting to sort of think that either Lesley and I (and possibly Sahra Guleed and Jaget Kumar as well) had been a bit paranoid or that this Faceless Man was a much sneakier bugger than we’d given him credit for and we were just screwed. Things were, in fact, as quiet as they could be in an echoing stone castle filled with children gearing up for the first Quidditch game of the year. Slytherin vs. Gryffindor is always good for a solid grudge match, and tempers and illicit betting were already beginning to pick up. It was a fairly solid distraction from my problems, especially since Lesley said she was going to be too busy to see me in person for a while.

Even the professors were getting pretty into it, especially Miriam Stephanopoulos, Deputy Headmistress, flying instructor, head of Gryffindor, and scariest lesbian on campus, who it was said had been heard loudly saying that if the Gryffindor team didn’t win, they all had detention for a month—only not during practice, because that would be counterproductive. I hadn’t heard anything of the sort personally, but I believed it anyway.

Now, I knew Thomas was as much of a Quidditch nut as anyone else in the building, so that morning, I asked, casually, if he fancied walking over to the game together. Just in the interest of spending time with a fellow coworker, you understand. But despite his clear love of the game, he told me that he was going to be late getting over, actually, on account of having something else to do.

“Something better than watching the annual Gryffindor/Slytherin pissing match and bloodbath?” I said dubiously. “My house isn’t even playing, and I still think it’s one of the better games of the season.”

“Well, Hufflepuff isn’t playing either,” he said, with the fervor of a posh white man who’d gone to public school even before Hogwarts and had adopted house partisanship with all the passion people usually expend on footie or gang rivalries, “otherwise of course I’d be there. And you might think differently of the…particular brand of zealous enthusiasm students bring to this game now that you’re one of the authority figures required to break things up.”

I had, in fact, forgotten about that, and I swore. “Maybe I’d better hide with you instead,” I tried hopefully.

“I’m not _hiding_ , just getting some obligations out of the way,” he said, laughing, but in a way that didn’t really seem likely to end in inviting me along. “You and Abdul head over, Peter, I’ll be along when I can. You can catch me up on the score.”

Abdul and I did end up making our way over without him, settling down into the stands and casting a couple of discreet warming charms, because November in Scotland is not really ideal weather for sitting on your bum a hundred feet in the air. It looked like every student in school had turned out for the show, as well as most of the professors, though not all of them—I thought Hugh Oswald was likely taking a quiet nap somewhere, which meant Mellissa was probably with him, watching him like a hawk to make sure he didn’t need anything when he woke. She’d shown an astonishing lack of interest in sport anyway, so I doubt she felt she was missing anything.

Dominic Croft, however, settled himself in the seat next to me and expressed a cheerful desire for Slytherin to go to hell as a way of greeting us. This being about par for the course today, I nodded at him in a friendly way, but admitted that both Abdul and I were Ravenclaws, and therefore Switzerland in this particular battle.

“Oh, I’m actually Hufflepuff,” he said, shrugging. “But the boyfriend’s Gryffindor, so you know how it is. Solidarity and all that.”

I shuddered. “I do know how it is. I had two best mates in school, except one of them was Gryffindor and the other was Slytherin, so the beginning of November every year was like a war zone, and I was disputed territory. You’d think two hot girls fighting over you would be fun, but it really, really wasn’t.”

“So I’m really not going to convert you away from neutrality, huh,” Dominic said, laughing.

“Afraid not,” I admitted. “Somehow they’d _know_. Maybe you can get Abdul, though.”

“All right,” Abdul said, agreeably enough. “Thomas might be a tad disappointed, but he will just have to take the consequences of being late to the game.”

I blinked. “Hufflepuff and Slytherin aren’t usually that tight. What does he care?”

“Quite a long time ago, he had a close friend who was in Slytherin, I believe,” Abdul said. “In general, if Hufflepuff isn’t involved, he cheers for them instead.”

“A long time ago? They…lost touch?”

Abdul just shook his head. “He died, I’m afraid. I never even met him. But Thomas keeps to his old habits, in general.”

I could easily believe it. There was something dependable and almost timeless about the man, and I didn’t think it was just because he dressed like a 1940s film star. It was sad, too, to think that he cheered for Slytherin in place of a long dead friend.

The Lesley voice at the back of my head asked what the friend had died of, but I resolutely ignored it. Lots of people have dead friends. People die every day. Not everything is related to heinous crimes perpetrated by Dark wizards.

We watched the game with all the cheerful complaisance of people whose houses weren’t involved in any particularly vicious rivalries and just enjoyed sport, though Abdul and Dominic cheered Gryffindor and booed Slytherin anyway. I cheered everyone indiscriminately, so that I wouldn’t be facing any particularly vicious retribution when Lesley and Bev inevitably found out. Thomas showed up about halfway through, sitting down on Abdul’s other side and affecting offense when he realized what team his friend was supporting.

“I don’t suppose you’re on my side, Peter,” he said hopefully.

“Switzerland,” I repeated firmly. “I’m on everyone’s side.”

“That’s a rather large simplification of a complex historical military and diplomatic stratagem,” he said, “but all right.”

I resisted the urge to roll my eyes. Purebloods think that just because just because wizards fought on both sides of World War II, they know everything there is to know about it.

“Whatever their military and diplomatic strategies,” I said, “they would not be enough to put off Lesley May and Beverley Brook Thames. So I’ll just keep cheering for both sides, if that’s all right with you, Thomas.”

He laughed and agreed it was, and I kept my applause to a minimum when Gryffindor crushed Slytherin thoroughly and gave him a commiserating but manly clap on the back.

Dominic peeled off from us after that, saying he had to go Floo his boyfriend to give him the good news, but Thomas, Abdul, and I walked back to school more slowly, chatting about the game and heading off the occasional angry or exultant teenager before any property damage occurred.

We ran into Harold Postmartin only a little bit into the Entrance Hall, looking exhausted and the kind of anxious that makes me worry about heart attacks when I see it on men as old as him. He called out Thomas’s name as soon as he saw us, waving us over urgently.

“Have you seen Alexander or Miriam?” he said, once he’d gotten our attention.

“Still congratulating the team, I think,” Abdul answered. “What on earth’s happened? I thought you were at the game.”

“I was,” Postmartin said. “But, well, it wasn’t much of a contest by the end, was it? And it reminded me that our Quidditch captain asked me if I could find some of the old records previous captains have kept. After all, even we’ve had one or two go pro, and she was eager to hear about anything that might give us an edge over Hufflepuff in a few weeks. If there’s one thing a Ravenclaw is good for, it’s remembering to write down our innovations. I was getting a little tired anyway, so I thought I’d leave early and avoid the rush and the crowd. But as I was getting back to the library, I heard a noise from inside. I went in to see if I could help whoever it was, and I think I startled them in the process of looking for something awkward. They pushed past me with a spell and went out the door, and I’m afraid I’ve no idea who it could’ve been.”

Thomas had gone very still next to me, and Abdul was frowning darkly.

“You didn’t see them?” I said.

“No, I think they were under a Disillusionment Charm. Or it could’ve been an Invisibility Cloak, I suppose, but those are a good deal rarer.”

“What were they looking at?” Thomas asked. His voice was very calm, almost conversational, but I wouldn’t have wanted to see him waiting for me at the end of a dark alley.

“Old school records, of all things.” Postmartin’s brow furrowed. “Though I can’t think why they’d have wanted to sneak in for that. It might not be readily accessible, but all anyone ever has to do is ask, really.”

“Unless they don’t want anyone to know what they’re looking for or who it is that’s looking,” Thomas said quietly. Which had been nearly word for word what I’d been thinking.

“Hang on, about what time was that? When you ran into them,” I said.

Postmartin tugged on the collar of his robes. “At least forty-five minutes ago. Potentially a full hour. I do apologize; the spell our intruder used knocked me into a wall, and I was quite disoriented for some time following. It took me some time to get down here. I had to keep sitting down and waiting for the dizzy spells to pass.”

“What?” Thomas exclaimed. “Good Lord, Harold, sit down and let Abdul look at you.”

“But Alexander—”

“I’ll go get Alexander,” he said. “You’re in no condition to be running around.” In one fluid moment, he shrugged off his robes, and wordlessly transformed them into a chair. It left just the Muggle suit underneath, decades out of date and stylish despite it. I couldn’t help being impressed, both by the magic and his, uh, fashion sense, but luckily for me, I think he missed my admiring look, distracted as he was with herding Postmartin into sitting.

“As a medical professional, I quite agree with Thomas,” Abdul was saying. “You rest; he’ll do the legwork of getting our esteemed lord and master.”

“Indeed I will,” Thomas said. “Excuse me, gentlemen, I’ll be right back.” He left, if not quite at a run, at least at a brisk walk.

Abdul was already seeing to Postmartin, and I edged away a little, my thoughts racing at a mile a minute. I hovered awkwardly, almost bouncing on my toes, feeling both useless and absolutely desperate to be halfway to the library already, before anyone else got there. “Are you really sure you’re not hurt too badly?”

“Fine, fine,” he said, though I couldn’t help noticing that his eyes weren’t quite focusing on Abdul.

“You shouldn’t have tried to engage them at all,” Abdul said admonishingly, and Postmartin tutted.

“Now, now. I may not be on Thomas’s level, but that doesn’t mean I couldn’t do some impressive spellwork in my day.” His expression turned a little rueful. “Though that might be slightly longer ago than I care to admit.”

“Uh,” I said, “I’m going to just check out the library, make sure no one went back and there wasn’t any damage.” I barely waited for Abdul’s quick waved acknowledgement before I was sprinting in the opposite direction, taking the stairs two at a time.

I was panting by the time I made it to the library, but this was the first real sign I’d had yet that there really was something fishy going on here. And worse—none of my main suspects had been at the game. If it really had been an hour ago, that would’ve given Thomas time to arrive late, and I hadn’t seen Mellissa Oswald or Varvara Tamonina at all. Not to mention I had no idea where Awa Shambir was or if she could get into the building. Mellissa would’ve been with her grandfather, and after a moment’s thought, I remembered that Varvara had agreed to monitor a detention, saying that she hadn’t much interest in Quidditch, and as an immigrant to the British Isles who hadn’t gone to Hogwarts for school, she didn’t have any stake in the House rivalries either.

So that was all of them unaccounted for. I was really acing this detective thing.

I took my time looking for the library, secure in the knowledge that Thomas and Seawoll and Stephanopoulos would be well behind me. It didn’t take me too long to get into the room of school records, since it seemed that Postmartin had forgotten to lock it again after the incident. It was a deceptively small space, until you realized that the drawer of each filing cabinet was a lot deeper than it looked.

Unfortunately, if whoever was in here had been looking for something specific, they’d also been cleaning up after themselves. There were no drawers left conveniently open or fingerprints in the dust. Not that there was any dust at all: house-elves are very thorough, even in rooms that don’t get a lot of use. As a crime scene it was basically useless, except—what on earth would the Faceless Man want with old school records?

Finally, at a loss and trying very hard not to think about the fact that Thomas had really given no good reason for being late to the game, I pulled my notebook out. I’d been keeping it shrunk in a pocket for ease of access, so I restored it to its normal size and texted Lesley.

_Which means the only one of the new professors I can alibi out_ , I explained, once I’d told her everything, _is Dominic Croft, so I guess my intrepid seventeen-year-olds were onto something after all_.

_I’m glad you’re doing as well as the seventeen-year-olds,_ she said. _Would you like a round of applause? I need more information if I’m going to figure this out._

_Yeah. Hang on, someone’s coming, talk later._

By the time Seawoll, Stephanopoulos, and Thomas came in, I was leaning against the wall casually, notebook safely stowed away.

“Grant?” Seawoll said. “What the fuck are you doing here?”

“Just keeping a lookout, sir,” I replied. “I didn’t want any students to come up here and contaminate the crime scene. Or anyone else, for that matter.”

He glared at me. “Who says there was a crime?”

I shrugged. “Just a figure of speech. It doesn’t look like whoever it was left many traces behind, even if Mr. Postmartin did surprise them.”

He didn’t look pleased with my deductions, and I had a feeling he didn’t think I was much better at not contaminating crime scenes than students. “I’ll be the judge of that, Grant. Now, if you’re finished over here, I think there was a fight brewing in the Great Hall.”

I took the hint and made a break for it, but as I was leaving, I thought I felt eyes on the back of my neck. When I hesitated and gave in to the urge to glance behind me, I saw Thomas Nightingale just in the process of turning away. He looked a little pensive, but then he was walking forward to join Seawoll and Stephanopoulos, and I shook the feeling off.

It was time to do what Lesley said and get more information. Funnily enough, I didn’t think she was going to be very pleased with how I planned to do that.

#

The fight in the Great Hall turned out to be just a few posturing fifteen-year-old boys who were clearly desperate for a teacher to come get them out of it without any loss of face. I separated them and sent them back to their dorms without much trouble before doing a quick pass of other public areas, just in case. Seawoll might’ve just been getting me out from underfoot, but it was the aftermath of the Gryffindor/Slytherin grudge match, and that did tend to get messy. Then I headed for Gryffindor Tower, because while I wasn’t totally sure where to find Hufflepuff right about now, I had a pretty good idea of where Sahra Guleed, not only Head Girl but also bloody amazing Gryffindor Beater, would be.

I didn’t want to actually barge in on the Gryffindor festivities, though. It felt a little not-subtle, me being (theoretically) an authority figure and also not a member of the house, so I grabbed Abigail Kamara by the shoulder on her way into their common room and said, “I need you to give Sahra Guleed a message for me.”

She looked me up and down and clearly found me wanting, but apparently my status as a professor was good for something, because she said, “Yeah? What’s the message?”

“Tell her I need to talk to her and Jaget Kumar as soon as possible. Tell her it’s important.”

She frowned. “What do you want to talk to them about?”

“That’s not part of the message,” I said before I remembered that the easiest way to get kids way too interested in what you’re doing is to tell them it’s a secret. “Uh, about—something’s rotten in the state of Denmark.”

She gave me some serious side-eye. “You want to talk to them about _Hamlet_? Who are you, some old man English teacher?”

Kids always think they’re so funny, despite any and all evidence to the contrary. Mostly, I was just impressed she’d read _Hamlet_. “No, I’m your teacher and cousin, and my mum knows your mum,” I said, and then I promptly felt about ten years old, because really? Had I actually just threatened to tell her mum on her?

She sniggered at me, which I justly deserved.

“All right, look,” I said. “Help me out here.”

She gave me an appraising look. “You’re friends with Nightingale, yeah? You’re always sitting with him at meals and stuff.”

“I—I guess, sure.”

“He’s the Defense professor, so he’s got to be a badass, right?” she said, though she sounded a little bit doubtful about that. “I want him to teach me to fight.”

“Duel,” I corrected automatically, because under no circumstances do you ever say that you are teaching children to fight, not unless you have a fetish for lawsuits. In which case I don’t judge. “And why on earth do you want to learn to duel? You’re not in any trouble, are you?”

She snorted. “Because it would be cool. Get him to teach me.”

“I—look, he’s not available right now, and my message is time sensitive, so—” She glared at me, and I caved like wet paper. “Okay, if you take my message to Sahra now, I promise I will try, okay? I’ll talk to him about it tomorrow.”

She held out her hand. “Shake on it. Swear on your magic.”

“I’m absolutely not doing that,” I informed her. “And if anyone ever tells you to, sock them in the face and then tell a teacher. But I’ll shake on it. We’ve got a deal, all right?”

“All right,” she agreed, after a moment. She shook and gave me a deep nod, sealing our compact, and then scampered into the Gryffindor common room, hopefully to talk to Sahra.

Kids are really unbelievable.

But Sahra came out after just a couple of minutes, looking flushed with victory, and also a bit concerned, so apparently Abigail had done her job. “Something’s rotten in the state of Denmark, sir?”

I winced. “I just said that to—I really do need to talk to you and Jaget. Uh, something’s rotten in the state of Hogwarts?”

Her eyes narrowed. “Is it,” she said flatly. “All right, I’ll get Jaget. Your office, sir?”

“Sure,” I said. “Thanks.”

#

“What did you want to talk to us about, Professor?” Jaget said, once we’d all convened around my desk. There were streaks of Gryffindor red on his face and a lion pin on the breast of his robes, clear evidence of who he’d been cheering for today. Judging by the piece of confetti stuck to his collar, I had a feeling Sahra hadn’t had to look much farther for him than the celebration in her own common room.

“Can we just be honest with each other?” I said. “You two are trying to figure out who among the new faculty might be working for the Faceless Man. I’m trying to figure who among the new faculty might be working for the Faceless Man. Logic says it would probably be simplest if we worked together.”

Sahra and Jaget traded a deeply speaking look. Unfortunately, my eyes didn’t seem to be tuned to the right frequency, since I had no idea what it was speaking about. In the event that they were gearing up for the obvious, though, I decided to head it off at the pass.

“Can we please not do the ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about’ routine? It has been a weird bloody day, and I am not in the mood. I know who the Faceless Man is, and I know he’s got an interest in this school—isn’t that enough to be getting on with?”

Jaget broke first. “You could also know that if you were, say, working for him and trying to work out what we know.”

“What happened to me being mostly harmless?”

“That was before you came out with all of this,” Sahra said. I got the feeling she liked me, really, but only up to a point that would not preclude her kicking my ass if I turned out to be evil. I respected that. “This whole conversation is making you seem a lot less harmless, if I’m honest. Got any proof of your pure intentions?”

“Great, just a couple months into term and I’m already ruining my reputation.”

Sahra snorted but didn’t seem inclined to let me off the hook.

“Look, at some point you’ve got to trust somebody,” I said. “And since I’m guessing you’re not actually part of whatever investigation Seawoll’s got going on, if he has one, I’m not sure you’ve got a whole lot of options that aren’t me.” They glanced at each other again, and I added, “If it helps, I’ve got like three different people who can attest that I was at the Quidditch game all afternoon.”

“And why,” Sahra said slowly, “would we care what you’d been doing this afternoon?”

Fuck. Lesley always says that the key to a good interrogation is to remember that information should only flow one way, and I’d gone and fucked it up already. “Pool what we know?” I suggested, determined to make the best of it.

“Something happened during the Quidditch game,” Jaget said, and he and Sahra gave each other another meaningful look. “That’s…interesting.”

Sahra nodded. “What makes you think we’re not working with Seawoll?”

“Because I don’t think he thinks much of teenagers, and I think he trusts Tho—Professor Nightingale a hell of lot more than you two do.”

“And you?” Sahra said, whip fast. “Do you trust Nightingale? You’re always with him.”

Why were all my students noticing that? “I like him all right,” I admitted. “I don’t totally know if I trust him. Can we start being upfront with each other now?”

Sahra sighed and stretched her legs out, one after the other, crossing her arms over her chest. “Okay,” she said. “Just so you know, we’re not directly working with Seawoll and Stephanopoulos, but they don’t mind us poking around so long as we’re smart about it.”

I mentally translated that as ‘we decided that what they didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them’ and nodded.

“We don’t really know what they’re doing, but it’s probably something,” she went on, “but since we’re actually the ones who helped them work out there was something up last year, we figure we’ve earned the right to do some investigating of our own now.”

I leaned forward with interest. “What was up last year? All I’ve got that was that the Faceless Man was involved.”

“He was—blackmailing isn’t quite the right word,” Jaget said. “He’d done something to them, and I think he’d told them the only way he’d undo it is if they worked for him. It was—not good, from what we saw. It wasn’t—it was really bad.”

“Them being the professors who left at the end of last year,” I clarified absently, barely taking note when he nodded. ‘Something’ is a pretty vague descriptor, as they go, but I had a feeling I could fill in the blanks, and if I couldn’t, I didn’t want to. There was a place in London I’d started calling the Strip Club of Dr. Moreau after Lesley described it to me: chimeras he’d made to be like a real cat-girl fantasy, severed heads that were still alive and speaking— They’d shut it down and salted the earth, and Lesley’d only ever given me a bare-bones description, but I thought I had as much of an idea of what ‘something’ the Faceless Man might do as I wanted.

“Seawoll and Stephanopoulos got rid of them,” Sahra said, “but he was after something by the end is the problem, and we don’t think he’s likely to give up.”

I frowned. “By the end? Not from the beginning?”

“We think,” Jaget said, “based on what Professor Dunlop said, after everything, that at the beginning, he was just trying to, uh—”

“Mold young minds, sort of,” Sahra finished for him. “Get in good with the next generation, as it were. Not exactly recruiting, but making connections who wouldn’t be too unhappy to see him, come the time.”

“Hogwarts is good for that,” Jaget said grimly. “All the evil bastards always want to get at the impressionable kiddies.”

I couldn’t argue with that, and I said so. “But he changed his mind?”

Sahra nodded. “Yeah. More fool him, because we might not’ve caught them if he hadn’t. But he was definitely looking for something in the end. Something in the castle.”

“Something physical?”

“No, the real evil goal was friendship all along,” she said acerbically. “Since we don’t actually know what it is, we can’t be totally certain, but it seems bloody likely, doesn’t it?”

“All right, all right.” I thought about it. “Did you notice them looking in any place in particular?”

“Seventh floor, maybe,” Jaget said. “But a couple of places on the seventh floor, so maybe he’s one of those weirdos who just really likes the number.”

“Hard to say,” Sahra agreed. “They mostly seemed pretty confused about where to look, and it’s not like they’d tell us, especially after Professor Dunlop got fucking murdered for talking at all.”

I twitched, because that I hadn’t heard about, and I distinctly remembered Lesley saying that covering up the deaths of professors was probably beyond the Ministry.

“So that’s us,” Jaget said. “Your turn. What happened during the Quidditch game?”

I told them. “I can officially alibi me and Professor Croft,” I finished, “but not any of the ones you seemed to think were shifty. Though if Professor Tamonina really was running detention, that can’t be hard to check.”

Jaget looked at Sahra. “Wasn’t—?”

“Yeah, he was,” she said, and then she looked at me. “I know a kid who was in detention today. Third year Slytherin, not even a little trustworthy, but he’ll tell me what I need to know if I promise to turn a blind eye to his…interest in Herbology.”

“Interest in—oh, gotcha. Okay. You’ll tell me what he says?”

Sahra grinned at me. “I guess we will.”

#

I am a man of my word, so the next morning, I said to Thomas, “Abigail Kamara wants you to teach her dueling.”

“Abigail Kamara the first year Gryffindor?”

Good, so apparently she was this memorable to _everyone_. “Yeah.”

“I shudder to think of that girl loosed on the world with a grounding in magically fighting people,” he said dryly, “which is why I’ve been loath to do anything of the sort all the times she’s asked after and during class.”

“It’s not that I disagree with you,” I said, because I really didn’t, “but I sort of promised her I’d try to talk you into it.”

“Good lord, how did she make you do that?”

“Her dad knows my mum,” I said, which was technically accurate but highly misleading. I love that kind of statement, which Bev always said meant I should’ve been in Slytherin.

“I see,” he said. “I still don’t think that’s a very good idea.”

“Look at it this way,” I offered, “if you don’t do it, she’ll probably try to figure it out on her own, and that’s almost certainly going to be a whole lot worse. In terms of property damage and grievous injuries to others, if nothing else.”

He grimaced. “You may have a point. I’ll consider seeing if Alexander will allow me to start a Dueling Club, how about that? You’ve discharged your duty; Miss Kamara may rest satisfied.”

“You’re my hero,” I told him solemnly, and he laughed and told me to eat my breakfast.

After the meal, I was headed back to my office to get ready for, naturally, the first year Gryffindors and Slytherins, when Sahra Guleed grabbed me by the elbow. Her hijab today was a gradient, yellow through all the way to orange to whatever orange’s called when it’s really dark but not brown. The edges were sewn with black beads. I wondered if she had trouble finding ones that looked good with her house colors.

“Hello, sir,” she said. “Got a minute? Jaget’s got Runes, but I have a free.”

“Sure,” I replied. “You can help me prep for class.”

She made a face at me but agreed and followed me down to the dungeons, where I made her start setting out lacewing flies as neatly as possible. “Just in case someone comes by and wonders why you’re here,” I said. “You’re getting extra credit.”

“I think you just want someone else to do the work,” she said. “And I’d better actually get that extra credit. I could use it. I’m pants at Potions. I wanted to drop it last year, but bloody job requirements.” But she got the lacewing flies anyway, and she was careful about it, which is good, because they’re very delicate.

“You’re fine; you just need to slow down a bit,” I said absently as I closed the door. “You don’t get points for being done first.”

“Thanks, sir, I’ll keep it in mind.”

“So?” I asked, after checking for listening spells and potentially invisible lurkers. It pays to be paranoid sometimes.

“I talked to Palmer.”

“Palmer?”

“Zach Palmer, the permanently stoned third year. He was in detention with Tamonina during the game, and he said some interesting stuff.”

I started writing a set of instructions for a Forgetfulness Potion on the blackboard. I did remember Zach Palmer, who yes, was always red-eyed and twitchy, now that she mentioned it. He wouldn’t be my first choice for informant, but beggars can’t be choosers. “Interesting like how? Tamonina mysteriously vanished for about half an hour in the middle of detention?”

“Not quite,” she said. “He says she had them doing lines, and she was there the whole time.”

“Oh.” I recognized the sinking feeling in my chest well enough to realize that I’d really been hoping Varvara Sidorovna Tamonina’s absence from the match yesterday was going to be just as suspicious as Thomas’s.

“Don’t be too disappointed. I wasn’t finished.” I turned around to see her grin at me, quick and bright. “It gets so much better. See, he did manage to somehow knock basically everything he’d ever owned off his desk about halfway through, creating an extremely loud noise and also very nearly breaking his chair when he fell off of it trying to clear everything up.”

“So?” I said. “He was probably high.”

“Probably he was,” she agreed. “But the thing is, Professor Tamonina didn’t even react. Like, not even a glance up to see what the hell that was. He said she just kept reading her book like nothing happened, even though he spilled ink absolutely everywhere and ended up running all over the place trying to get enough towels to mop it up because he couldn’t remember how to do a basic Scourgify.”

“She didn’t even look?”

“Not a twitch,” Sahra confirmed. “Palmer thought maybe she was just being nice about it—he says she’s nice in general, claimed she only gave him detention because she had to, some weed literally spilled out of his pocket while he was standing right in front of her—but I don’t quite buy it. If she was nice, wouldn’t she have helped him clean up? And if she wasn’t, wouldn’t she have given him a proper bollocking? Who just sits there?”

“There’s magic,” I said, “that’ll let you do a sort of doppelganger/simulacrum thing, but it’s really high level. And it won’t do much, just a sort of assigned set of tasks, and then it’s done. Not like a Shadow Clone Jutsu, more useless.”

“I really wish I hadn’t understood that last sentence,” she told me. “But that is basically what I was thinking.”

“Well, that’s suspicious,” I said. “Really suspicious.”

“It is, but don’t be too pleased. She might’ve just not wanted to have to run a detention on her day off, after all. I assume even teachers skive. It just means we can’t write off any of the weirder new professors, not her or your Nightingale or even Professor Oswald the Younger, who just wasn’t there.”

It’s really lucky black people don’t blush much. “He’s not mine.”

She eyed me, and then she smirked. “I just meant that he’s your friend, and it would probably suck for you if he turned out to be evil anyway. But sure, that too.”

God _damnit_. “Get the hell out of my classroom,” I told her.

“Ten points from Ravenclaw for language,” she said cheerfully, and then she ducked the stick of chalk I threw at her as she ran out cackling.

#

The problem was that I really _liked_ Thomas Nightingale. Lesley was right after all; I didn’t want him to be guilty just because it would’ve sucked. This, of course, is not best practices when it comes to trying to figure out whether or not someone’s actually committed a crime, but the problem was that he had this wonderfully dry sense of humor and these gorgeous eyes and this sort of awkward—

It’s a fact that people are a lot more attractive to you when you get the feeling that they really want you to like them, is the thing.

And I did like him, so I still found myself in his office not long after the match, despite the fact that he kept climbing the ‘incredibly fucking suspicious’ ladder of suspects.

But I still needed help with the stuff for Lesley, or at least that was what I kept telling myself, so I stopped by to see if he had a minute to spare on watching me blow things up and telling me how they could be blown up better. He waved me in and asked me to wait a minute while he finished some chores, and then he disappeared into what I assumed was his private rooms and left me standing there. So naturally, while he was gone, I had a bit of a poke around, because I’m a nosy bugger, and I was conducting an investigation, albeit a totally unsanctioned one.

I didn’t find much of interest at first, but as I was flipping idly through a notebook of grades (Abigail was getting top marks, and so were Sahra and Jaget), a small rectangle of heavy cardstock slipped out from between the pages. I picked it up, intending to try to replace it, but I turned it over and stopped, arrested.

It was a wizard photograph, extremely old and not very high resolution—or at least, I thought it was old at first, until I realized that one of the two young men grinning and mugging for the camera with their arms slung over each other’s shoulders was Thomas. He looked young, maybe just a few years older than me, and he looked as brilliantly happy as I had ever seen anyone.

I couldn’t help staring. It was—I think I’d sort of assumed, all that time, that he was just sort of naturally a bit serious. There was that posh, stiff upper lip, public school kind of training, after all, but here was evidence, clear as day, that that was pretty far from true.

It was hard to tell where exactly he and the other man were—on a road, up against a brick building, but that could be a few million separate locations, and that was before you even left Scotland—but they were dressed like my grandfather. Well, perhaps not like my actual grandfather, as such, but in suits that looked even more retro than the kind of thing Thomas usually wore under his robes. And the actual picture itself was in black and white, only it was that old kind of black and white where it’s actually brown.

The other man was a bit shorter than Thomas, maybe just under six foot, with hair that looked like a lighter color—blond, or maybe just a paler brown—and a long and sternly pointed nose that made him just miss the bar for classically handsome. His smile made up for it. It was a bit of a smirk, but in that charming way that Lesley calls ‘rakish.’ He looked like he should be playing the dastardly but charming rogue in a Douglas Fairbanks movie.

I decided I liked him.

“What on earth are you looking at?” said Thomas’s voice from behind me, and I jumped like a guilty kid who’s been caught looking at skin mags. He raised an eyebrow at me and came forward, looking over my shoulder, and then he stilled. “Oh.”

“Sorry,” I said, because rooting through other people’s personal belongings is really bad manners unless you’re their mother or an actual law enforcement official. “I get distracted easily, and this just fell out of your grades.

“Oh.” He was still just staring at the picture, and then he abruptly looked up and smiled at me, but it looked a bit tight at the edges. “I don’t mind, I was just surprised to see it. I’d forgotten I had that there.”

I worried at my bottom lip. “So, that’s you, right?”

“Oh, yes, quite.” He reached out to tap the edge of the picture. “I must have been…twenty-seven, maybe? I think it was spring. As I recall, I’d just gotten a promotion, and a few of my friends insisted on taking me out to get me very drunk. One of them took this just before we set out.” He caught my eye and grinned, lightning-quick. “The, ah, the clothes and such were something of fad then. Take pictures that looked like they were from the 1920s, though I’ll be damned if I remember why. I think we thought it was funny.”

“An old meme,” I offered, and he blinked at me.

“I’m afraid I have no idea what that means.”

I tried to explain a bit, but I didn’t get the feeling he really got it, especially since I wasn’t totally sure he even knew what the internet was, which was where most of my examples came from. But he shrugged and agreed I was probably right anyway.

“Who’s this, then?” I asked, hovering my finger over the other man. “Your debonair friend.”

“Debonair?” he said, and then he smiled faintly. “Yes, I suppose he was, rather. That’s David. David Mellenby. He and I were…very good friends.”

But I noticed the pause, infinitesimal though it had been, and I had a feeling that ‘friends’ wasn’t the word he’d wanted to use. I wet my lips. “Yeah?” I said, as noncommittally as I could. I hadn’t ever had to try and imply to someone that it was cool to come out, if they wanted to, and I wasn’t totally sure on the protocol. They really ought to give you an instruction card.

“Mm,” he said, so whatever I was trying to hint at, he wasn’t getting it. And then he said, sounding thoughtful, “Actually, you remind me of him, a bit.”

“I do?” I looked at the picture again, at that smirk, the way the figure casually and confidently tilted his head as he looked out at us. “Really?”

“Not in your personalities, exactly.”

I glanced down at David Mellenby. “Is it because we look so similar, then?” I said, looking back at Thomas and blinking at him as guilelessly as I could.

He stared at me and then snorted softly, shaking his head. “Yes, Peter, exactly,” he said, rubbing an absent finger along one edge of the photograph. It was worn soft with age and love, like he probably did it a lot. “You two could be twins. I don’t know how I’d ever tell the difference if he were…” He trailed off, and his smile went sad.

I looked down at my shoes, away from his face. That kind of past tense verbs, then.

“I was going to say,” he continued at last, “that you have similar interests. He had the same sort of obsession with the hows and whys of magic. He was always experimenting and theorizing and telling me things that sounded terribly clever, though I’m afraid I rarely understood one word in five. He liked to push the boundaries of spells and how we do things. Actually,” he went on, “he taught here as well. Not Potions, though. Arithmancy. And he was a Slytherin, despite his intelligence, though that might’ve been more a matter of family. Or perhaps not. He did make a very good Slytherin.”

“I wasn’t actually all that good at Arithmancy,” I admitted. “But I think I would’ve liked him.”

“I think you would have, too,” he said quietly.

I leaned against the desk and fiddled with one of his quills. “Is it—can I ask how he—?”

“Died?” he finished for me. “It was—he—” The he sighed and looked away, out the window, pressing his lips together tightly. “Actually, Peter, if it’s all right with you, I think I’d rather not talk about it.”

I resisted the urge to reach out and grab his shoulder comfortingly or even just give it all up and hug him, not because I didn’t want to—I did, badly, and from the look on his face, he probably could’ve used it—but because, well, we’re English. We don’t do that. And he was all posh and stiff upper lip, even if he hadn’t always been, and I couldn’t imagine his appreciating my acknowledging that he had any emotions at all. Instead, I just waited and pretended to be absorbed in the photograph and not even remotely noticing that his eyes looked a bit wet.

At last he took a deep breath and said, very quietly, “A long time ago now.”

I wondered if he were trying to convince himself. We stood there in silence a little longer, the dim light of the setting sun filtering in through the windowpane, and then he turned to me and grimaced, but it was probably meant to be a smile.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I was meant to be helping you with something.”

“Yeah,” I said. “But if—” I cut myself off, and finished, as casually as I could, “You still up for it, then? Not too busy?”

“Yes,” he said. “I think I’d like…” He shook his head. “I have plenty of time tonight, Peter.”

A distraction, then. Well, I was good for that. “Sure,” I said, going to the door and opening it for him. “In that case, I can’t wait for you to see my skinny grenades.”

“I’m already concerned,” he said, voice hitting dry instead of just sad, and I grinned.

#

I had an inkling I might’ve gone a bit heavy on the Exploding Fluid (yes, that’s really what the stuff in Erumpent horns is called. Yes, I wish I were joking. No, I don’t know who thought that was a good idea) from the color and speed of the reaction just before the actual boom. I jumped backwards, grabbing for my wand, but Thomas was faster than me. He slammed one arm across my chest, shoving me backwards, and the other appeared out in front of us before I even got my hand into my pocket.

“ _Protego_!” he shouted, and a bare instant later, the fiery ball of death impacted on the air a half meter in front of us with a truly impressive light show and enough force to rock Thomas back on his heels.

“Right,” I said, once the explosion had dissipated. Thomas’s arm was still a steel bar holding me back, and I decided to accept that with good grace and lean against the lab table behind me. My knees felt a little weak. “That might have been a bit overkill.”

“You don’t say.” His voice was clipped, and he holstered his wand with a hard, clean motion, no movement wasted.

“Hey.” I almost reached out to touch his shoulder, but I caught myself just in time. “We’re both fine. No harm done, right?”

He drew in a fast, harsh breath, and I thought he was going to say something, but instead he let it out in a sigh. He reached up to press two fingers against the middle of his forehead and said, “Yes, Peter. I wonder, though, if I could encourage you to be slightly more careful in the future.”

“I should’ve been paying more attention,” I admitted. But I’d been focusing on trying to impress him instead, which you’d think I’d’ve learned my lesson on by now—certainly similar motivations got me into enough trouble while I was at school and discovering puberty. “Thanks for the save.”

He shook his head, putting his hand in his pocket and turning to face me. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” I assured him. “Nice reflexes, by the way. Though I’m starting to think you’ve been holding out on me.”

I got a funny look for that. “Because I haven’t been shielding us every time you blow something up in this lab?” he guessed.

“What? No. Usually I’ve taken better precautions and we’re not actually in much danger. I meant that I was surprised you could tell the explosion was going to be that bad that quickly, because I didn’t think you knew that much about potions.”

“Oh.” He shook his head again, more briskly, as if banishing an errant thought. “I wasn’t even looking at the potion. I reacted to you.”

I stared at him. “To me?”

“You seemed alarmed and began moving backwards,” he said. “I judged that we might be in some danger and acted accordingly.”

I gaped. I think my mouth actually fell open while my brain sputtered out like a candle and had to be relit. I’d thought his reflexes were good when I’d been assuming that he’d been starting from the same point as me, but if he’d had to react to my reaction, delayed by _my_ reflexes—fuck. I sure as hell couldn’t have done it. I didn’t think Lesley could’ve done it. I was—impressed didn’t even begin to cover it. I wanted to get on my knees right there and ask if I could suck him off, and there he was, with a confused look on his face like he didn’t even get why I thought it was cool.

“Peter?” he said, taking a step closer to me. “Did you hit your head?”

“Yeah,” I choked out. “I mean, no, I’m fine. Fuck, Thomas. You are something else. That’s a compliment,” I added when he just blinked at me.

“Oh. Well. Thank you, then. Are you quite sure you’re all right?”

“I’m fine,” I said again. “I guess I should be glad you were at least a little thrown, or else I’d feel even more inadequate than I do right now. I’ve never heard you verbalize a spell before.”

It was his turn to look quietly stunned. “I did?” he said. “Oh… Yes, I suppose I did.”

“Not something you do often, I’m guessing.” I grinned at him, trying to tease him into relaxing a bit. “Good to know I managed to shake you up a little. First time I’ve ever seen you panic.”

He looked away. “Letting people know what spell you’re casting isn’t considered a benefit in the Aurors, so I suppose I got out of the habit, yes. I must’ve been—”

“Panicking?”

“Surprised,” he said firmly. “I was surprised. We should clean up.”

He had a point. I had laid fairly heavy-duty protective wards all over the serious equipment in my lab, since accidents happen, especially when you’re playing with explosives and you’re me, but the place was still covered with broken glass and leaking potions. We played tag team Vanish and contain and until my place looked significantly less like a strong breeze would light it up like a firework, though I preserved the space under the hood that had been ground zero for the latest fireball. Just for research purposes.

“All right,” I said. “Let’s try this again.” I caught the look he gave me, dubious but unwilling to say so, and I tried to be reassuring and emulate someone who knew what he was doing. “See, I’ve been trying to figure out how to avoid making these dependent on how good the user’s aim is and also how to make them less, uh, deadly. Since I’m guessing you guys usually like to be able to get a couple questions in, maybe a trial.”

“The Ministry does frown on murder, it’s true,” Thomas said mildly. “The coverups are so expensive, you see.”

“And here I thought you just transfigured the body and called it a day.” I started getting out potion materials again, and he took a few steps closer to me. “Besides, I was having a hard time stabilizing the—the catalyzing agent.” I can’t say Exploding Fluid with a straight face, as it turns out. “Especially since I needed to keep the activation wandless. The instant the catalyzing agent mixes with anything, we get a hell of a bang, so you can’t just hang onto a tube with them already mixed together. Combining them yourself is too time-consuming in a fight _and_ too dangerous, and keeping them separate with a spell means you have to end the spell when you’re done. So—sorry, this must be boring.”

“No,” he said immediately, and I looked to where he was standing a few short steps away, with one forearm resting on the side of the lab table as he watched me. His robes and jacket and tie had gotten left near the door, and he had his sleeves rolled up to the elbows. He looked comfortable and still somehow like he ought to be getting his picture taken for _Witch Weekly_. “I’m listening. Do go on, Peter.”

“Oh,” I said. “Uh, yeah, okay. I—where was I?”

“Keeping the catalyzing agent away from the rest of the potion.”

“Right.” I busied myself with weighing some Sopophorous beans, glancing over at him as subtly as I could. I hadn’t really thought he’d been bothering to listen to me ramble on about bomb making, but he was still watching me, smiling very faintly. “So I figured, if we can’t use a spell, let’s just get rid of the magical element entirely.” I picked up one of the containers I had left—some of the glass had shattered, but that I took care of with a quick _Reparo_ —and tossed it to Thomas. He caught it neatly and inspected it before looking back up at me with an inquiring expression. I leaned over with a grin and tapped the side of the skinny little test tube. “The outside’s one of those unbreakable beakers, just transformed a little. They’ll stand up to most things, but not, incidentally, an Erumpent based explosion. But see inside the tube?”

He held it up to his eyes again and nodded. “There’s another piece of glass in the middle, like a barrier. To keep the catalyzing agent apart from the rest of the potion?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Only that bit’s just regular glass, see?”

“I…don’t.” There was a rueful tilt to his lips. “You may have to spell it out for me, as if I were one of your students.”

I grinned at him. “This is the bit where I was really clever, so I hope you’re paying attention.”

“You have all my focus, I assure you.”

And wasn’t that a hell of a thought. He was staring right into my eyes, as intent as anything, and I had a sudden, vivid mental image of him looking at me just like that while he touched me. I had to shake the thought off quickly before it got its claws into my libido, and I tried to disguise the motion by grabbing for some more ingredients, clearing my throat. “The bit in the middle’s regular glass, and it’s very, very thin. Throw the skinny grenade against a hard surface—like the ground in front of your criminal, for instance—and the outside will stay intact, but the barrier will crack. The potions start leaking into each other, you get enough of a bang to completely break the middle bit, the rest of the potions mix, you get a much bigger bang, which shatters the unbreakable test tube and explodes right in your opponent’s face. No magic involved at all, and it all happens so close together it seems like one explosion.”

“Peter,” he said. I could see the surprise and pleasure in the way he started to smile, hear the admiration in his voice. “That is clever. Well done.”

I ducked my head, trying with limited success to affect some nonchalance. “Well, before you start calling the press, I have to admit, it currently works a lot better in theory than in practice.”

“Things usually do.” He passed the test tube back to me. Our fingers didn’t touch, unfortunately, as that kind of clever finagling only works in romance novels, and also, I wasn’t quite stupid enough over him yet to try. “You say it _currently_ works better in theory, though. May I assume you are correcting that?”

“I’m trying.” I held the test tube up between us, demonstrating, and then I threw it onto the ground. When I stooped to pick it up, there was a hairline fracture in the glass barrier in the middle. “If it cracks like that, the bomb still goes off, but not quickly. It takes a while for a drop of catalyzer to get into the other side, and while you wait, you’re twiddling your thumbs and having a tea while your opponent gets things all his way. On the other hand, you can’t plan for that, because unless you’ve got some sort of mad skill that lets you throw a test tube with the exact same force, to land at the exact same angle every time, you’ve got no idea how long it’s all going to take to go off.” I fished my wand out from my pocket and tapped the tube. “ _Reparo._ ” Handing it back to Thomas, I said, “Here, throw it at the wall for me.”

He did, with a nice overhand any professional Chaser would be proud of it, and it impacted beautifully against the stone. “ _Accio_ test tube,” I said. “All right, look how much more broken that is this time. It’s still going to take maybe thirty seconds to go off, but not much more. I’ve yet to throw it hard enough to explode on impact, but I bet even that’s possible.”

“So it’s a delayed reaction explosive, but with no telling how long the delay is going to be.”

“Pretty much, yeah. I’ve still got some kinks to work out. I was trying to get it to go faster last time by filling the catalyzer’s chamber more, to increase pressure and make the combination happen more quickly, but, uh—you saw how that worked out.”

A muscle in his face jumped. “I did, yes,” he said evenly. “I’m not sure you should repeat that particular experiment.”

“Don’t worry,” I assured him. “All evidence to the contrary, I’m not actually trying to get myself killed.”

“Thank you, that’s very comforting.” He hesitated. “Have you had…similarly dramatic incidents before?”

“Nothing that bad.” I lit a fire under one of my smaller cauldrons and started brewing the not Exploding Fluid half of my bomb, bending down to take a quick sniff. “Half my lab was smoking last week, though. Took me ages to clean all the scorch marks off the walls.”

He was silent long enough that I glanced over to see if he’d heard me. At first, I’d thought maybe he hadn’t, because he was staring past me at nothing in particular, looking completely distracted. But then he blinked a couple times, met my eyes again, and said, “I see. Please don’t do anything—” He stopped. “I wonder if I could—” He stopped again, and then he sighed. “I do hope you’re taking adequate precautions.”

And that’s about when, shamefully late into the conversation, I got a sort of clue: I realized that he was worried about me. Not only that, but that what he kept completely failing to say was almost certainly something like, ‘Please stop doing this without me around to protect you from yourself,’ which was oddly…sweet. Very sweet. But still somehow not as good as the fact that he hadn't actually said it, because while coming right out with it would've been a nice way to demonstrate that he cared about me, it also would've been a bit paternalistic and condescending. I’m an adult. It may not always seem like it, but I can look after myself. Sure, I was stupidly happy that he was concerned, but still I didn’t particularly want to hear that I couldn’t blow things up without adult supervision. And he wanted to say it, but he hadn’t, which was—I liked it.

I liked him. Fuck, but I liked him. I liked how he talked and how he listened to me and how he looked when I made him smile. I liked how fucking impressive he was all the time, and because I’m an egotistical bastard, I liked how apparently impressed he was with me. I liked how he looked in his suits, and I really wanted the opportunity to like how he looked out of them.

Which made it pretty fucking inconvenient that there was a good chance he was working for a chimera-creating terrorist and deserved to spend the rest of his life locked in Azkaban. I knew better to think I could just ignore that, and I didn't even want to, not really. At least this way I got to steel myself for it. Even though I wasn’t doing a great job of it.

“I’ll be careful,” I told him, and it felt like a lie. “I am careful. Honestly.”

#

I’ve never particularly enjoyed dreaming—I think it’s creepy when my brain does things I can’t control—but this one started out okay. I was lying in bed, but a better bed, a more comfortable one. It was huge and soft, with big fluffy pillows and one of those massive comforters that’s so puffy it almost looks like a second mattress. White, like you get in the pricey hotels. Bev and I went to one of those for our anniversary once, back when we were still together and wanted somewhere posh to celebrate. Only Beverley Brook wasn’t there. Instead, lying next to me under the covers, his body curved towards mine like a tower wall, was Thomas Nightingale. I could see his shoulder, so I could tell he was fully clothed, but his eyes were closed and his face was relaxed and peaceful with sleep, and he looked absolutely fucking gorgeous and like everything I’d ever wanted.

I just sort of stayed there, looking at him, watching him breathe in and out, which sounds a lot creepier than it felt at the time. I sort of knew I was dreaming, but in that hazy, distant way where it doesn’t seem to matter much—in fact, everything felt a bit like that, like when you wake up on a lazy morning, where you’re not really asleep anymore but you aren’t awake either.

I kept on watching him sleep, feeling peaceful and quiet, until I heard a noise towards the foot of the bed and raised my head to take a look. Then I nearly screamed, only no sounds would come out of my mouth. Standing there was a man, tall and sort of looming, and angled right to be looking at us, only he definitely wasn’t, on account of having no face.

There’s an episode of _Doctor Who_  where everyone’s televisions are eating their brains—really subtle, that, well done, lads—and when it happens to Rose Tyler, her face goes all smooth and featureless and fleshy, and she just sort of stands there, mindless. I never found that episode particularly frightening when it was airing, but when it was standing in the middle of my fucking dream, it was dead scary.

I reached over to grab Thomas’s shoulder and shake him awake, and I felt him sit up next to me, only when I looked over, his face had gone too—under his sleep-mussed hair was just that blank, featureless expanse.

I recoiled so hard I fell straight out of bed and onto the hard, stone floor, where I woke up in a cold sweat and aching all down my side where I’d hit the ground.

Now, the real, proper Faceless Man, who I have never seen, is faceless in a way where he’s probably got one, but no one can actually remember what he looks like. And he’s got a mask under that, just in case. Nothing has been removed via radio waves by an alien squatting in the telly. But still, it wasn’t hard to figure out what my subconscious was trying to tell me—who’s worried about his crush being evil? Not me, guv, you’ve got the wrong man—except I know for a fact that the subconscious is bullshit, and what you dream has nothing at all to do with your brain or what you actually want or fear or anything else. One of my ex-boyfriends, a Muggle, read psychology at uni, and we used to trade useless knowledge when we got bored with shagging. One of his favorite topics was ‘ways in which Sigmund Freud was fucking wrong about everything.’

All of which meant I knew the dream didn’t mean shit. But I still felt like I was getting bloody harassed by my own brain, like it was telling me I couldn’t trust Thomas—which I knew, and I didn’t, not really, so I didn’t see why it had to rub it in like that.

I didn’t sleep very well the rest of the night, and I felt like crap the next morning, so I was in no mood to have Jaget stop me on my way into breakfast to let me know that Mellissa Oswald had been officially cleared by her grandfather. Oswald the Elder had mentioned during a studiously casual (on Jaget’s part) conversation that he’d been in particularly bad health the day of the game, and Melissa had been legitimately nursing him the entire time. I nodded and thanked him for the information and then got to sit next to Thomas, eating kedgeree and wondering if he’d knocked Harold Postmartin into a wall after sneaking around looking at old school records.

Though fuck if I could think why.

I think he noticed I was quiet, because he looked a bit worried about me, and he refilled my tea and nudged a bit of blood pudding onto my plate when I wasn’t looking. He even asked me, carefully, if I maybe wanted to see Abdul, but I put him off by saying I just had a headache and the pain potion hadn’t kicked in yet. Him being so clearly concerned just made me feel worse about the whole thing, though, so I went to my lessons in foul mood.

By the time Lesley texted me during dinner, which I’d decided to skip, I just wanted to lie down with my head under a pillow and maybe a trashy novel. Instead, I got a message that said, _Can you call me?_

I stared at it for a couple minutes and groaned, and then I wrote back. _Can it wait?_

_Not really._

Worse and worse, but Lesley doesn’t ask for things, so I sucked it up. _Sure. Firecall the flat?_

_No,_ she said immediately. _Actually call. On a phone._

What the fuck. _I’d have to get off school grounds._

When she didn’t reply, I banged my head on the stone wall a couple of times, and then I gave up on having an even remotely peaceful night. _Okay,_ I said. _Give me twenty minutes._

I shrank the notebook again and dug into my desk drawer until I found my backup mobile. Lesley has my proper one, the fancy Android with all my apps and music and everything, because I figured not bringing it to Hogwarts drastically lessened the possibility of it spontaneously turning into a cuckoo—that actually happened to a kid in my house when I was thirteen, only it was his Walkman, not his phone. Which really begs the question, like all animal Transfiguration: can we actually create life? With magic? And if so, _how_? It’s one of those questions that just niggles at you, slowly driving you mad. Or it does if you’re me. Lesley just shrugged and said, “It does it with magic, Peter,” when I mentioned it to her.

But anyway, I have a backup mobile for nonmagical emergencies, which I usually keep turned off and in a box, just in case, so I grabbed that and walked calmly out of the building until I got to the edge of the wards, and then I Apparated to a random bit of forest in the Scottish countryside that I’d already found on a map before I even came here. Just in case. I’m not up to getting all the way to London every time my mum wants to talk.

I rang Lesley, and she picked up so fast she must’ve been waiting. “It’s me,” I said immediately. “What’s going on? Why am I calling you like this? Is everything okay?”

“Fine on this end,” she said tersely. “But I have to tell you something, and I didn’t want it to end up on paper, just in case—just in case. This seemed safer. Him being Pureblood, I don’t think he really gets phones.”

“He’s Pureblood?” I didn’t have any doubts about who she was talking about, but it’d always been my understanding that we knew absolutely nothing about the Faceless Man.

“I think so,” she said, and then, “The _point_ , Peter.”

“Right. What’s going on?”

“I was—Peter, listen, you know me giving you this information could get me killed, right? This is literally exactly what they tell you not to do in undercover missions. Promise you’ll—”

“Lesley,” I said. “I would literally die for you.”

For a minute, I could only hear her breathing, and then she said, “Me too.” Then she snorted. “Clearly. God, Peter, what the fuck are we doing?”

“No idea,” I admitted. “Listen. Do you want me to go back to bed and pretend this didn’t happen?”

“No,” she said. “I’d hate myself if I didn’t tell you, even if it makes me a good friend and a fucking shitty copper.” She sighed, loudly enough I could hear it through my mobile’s tinny speakers. “Okay. He definitely wants something in Hogwarts, he definitely has someone there he thinks is going to get it for him, and whatever it is, he thinks it’s going to help him with his chimeras. His creepy people research, I mean.”

I gagged unintentionally. “There’s something in Hogwarts that’s going to help with his creepy people research? …Oh, _god_. Lesley. You don’t think—” I swallowed hard. “You don’t think it’s less a thing and more—like it’s his research, and he’s going to do it. On the kids or something. On—” On Abigail or Sahra or Jaget. “Or the thing is subjects, or—”

“ _Peter_ ,” she said, sounding equally horrified. “I mean—no. No, I don’t think so. No.”

“You think?” I sounded sick with hope even to my own ears.

“Yeah—yeah, jeez. Hogwarts is a terrible place to get research subjects. People care too much about the kids there. If he did anything to them, the Auror department would suddenly have more money than God, as long as they promised to dedicate all of it to finding him.”

“Does God have a lot of money?”

“ _Peter_.”

“Yeah.” I rubbed my eyes. “Seriously?”

“Definitely,” she said. “I don’t think it’s that.”

“Fuck.” I slumped back against a tree. “Thank fucking God.”

She didn’t say anything, and the silence stretched out, but it was a relief just to know she was on the other end of the phone connection, listening to my silence like I was listening to hers. It was comforting just to know I could say her name and she’d respond, that I could hear her clear, lovely voice right in my ear.

“What do you think Hogwarts has that could help him with his research?” I said at last, once my heart had stopped racing quite so painfully.

“I don’t know,” she said. “A book? Not one in the library, before you make any clever comments about the card catalog.”

“They were in the library, though,” I said. “Maybe looking for a trail? God, now I’m imaging our spy as some weird bloodhound-person chimera.”

“Little bit obvious, don’t you think? Hard to miss that nose over the breakfast table.”

“Yeah, yeah, okay.”

We let the silence stretch out again, and then she broke it and said briskly, “All right, that’s enough of that. You go get some dinner and go to bed, all right?”

“You too. Take care of yourself.”

“Come on,” she said. “It’s me, remember? I’ve never almost blown up a school building.”

“That was one time. All right, maybe two.”

She laughed at me and hung up, and I made my way, slowly, back to Hogwarts.

#

I took a lot longer getting back to my office than I had leaving it, because I’d had a lot to think about, so it was well after dinner by the time I reached my door and saw Thomas knocking on it, looking awkward, shifting from foot to foot, uncharacteristically uncertain. He must’ve heard my footsteps, because he looked up and said, “There you are.”

“Here I am,” I agreed. “What’s up?”

He held out a covered plate to me, balanced on one hand. There was a flush high on his cheeks, and I couldn’t quite catch his eye. “You missed dinner. And you seemed so unwell earlier, I thought I’d just—that is, are you sure you’re quite all right?”

I meant to say yes. I swear to God and Lesley and my mum, I meant to just say yes and thank him and see him on his way, except when I opened my mouth, what came out was, “Are you working for the Faceless Man?”

He stared at me, and I stared back, and then I said, “Oh, fuck me,” and he said, “ _What_?”

I figured he was gearing up to say something else, so I grabbed his arm and opened the door to my office and dragged him bodily inside. “We’re not doing this in the hallway,” I said, slamming the door behind us and then dragging him all the way into the more sitting area of my living quarters, where I dropped his arm and sagged against the wall, looking at him.

“ _Peter_ ,” he said. “You think I’m—I’m working for the Faceless Man?”

At least he wasn’t pretending not to know who that was, because in the first unguarded flash of emotions, when I’d caught him wrong-footed by asking outright, I’d seen a fair amount of surprise but no confusion. He’d known what I was talking about.

“It’s not that I think you are,” I said. “It’s that you might be, and I’m not sure.”

“Oh,” he said. “Well. I’m not.” He smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “But then, I would say that, wouldn’t I.” He looked round and then gently rested the plate of food he’d bought me on a coffee table before looking at me again. “May I sit?”

I nodded helplessly.

He did sit, very carefully, on the edge of my couch, and looked up at me. “May I ask—no, I suppose not.” He ran a thumb, slowly, along the seam of the couch cushion, and then, seeming to realize he was doing it, pressed both of his hands together in his lap. “All right,” he said at last. “Well. I suppose I trust _you_ , after all.” He smiled, but it was humorless, and I hated myself a little for putting that expression on his face. “You should sit down.”

I hesitated, then did as he said all at once, half collapsing into an armchair. My furniture is all angled around the fireplace because I hate being cold, but it wasn’t lit just then and I thought I could feel a draft blowing through it. I could barely look at him. “I didn’t actually mean to—well, I wasn’t just going to say that. Not least because this means if you are—working for him, that is—that means I’m probably about to get offed.”

“I’m not going to kill you,” he said, sounding horrified. “I’m not— _Christ_ , Peter.” His knuckles went white briefly, his hands still fisted in his lap, and then they relaxed all of a sudden and he, very slowly, reached into the sleeve of his robes and then brought out his wand. I tensed, suddenly full of panicked adrenaline, but all he did was offer it to me, handle first.

It took me a couple seconds before I could get my fingers to unclench and take it, and I almost fumbled it twice. Once it was in my hands, I couldn’t figure out what to do with it, just held it there dumbly, thinking to stick it somewhere safe—except I couldn’t quite think of anywhere like that, so at last it just went into the pocket of my robes with mine. I looked back up and met his eyes, and they were gray and intense and fixed on me.

“I’m not going to kill you, Peter,” he said.

It occurred to me, because I inherited shitty timing from my father, the perennially almost famous, that I really liked the way he said my name.

I wanted to tell him that he could look at me like that all he wanted, but it wasn’t going to get him out of the fact that he was a cagey bastard who went inexplicably missing during the first Quidditch game of the season. I wanted to tell him fuck it all, I trusted him. But I think Lesley would call that giving my suspect an advantage, so I just traded him gaze for gaze and said, “Okay. Want to explain why I believe you?”

He could’ve told me to fuck off, but I’d known he wasn’t going to the instant he’d let me drag him into my office, and sure enough, he nodded slowly.

“Some time ago,” he said, “you said that Alexander Seawoll has a policy of only hiring Defense professors out of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement. That’s true up to a point. Certainly he prefers it, and he’s been known to say over the years that he believes his own history with the Aurors has made him a better teacher, but I doubt he’d make it a requirement, especially in a year when he had so much difficult hiring to do in so little time. Not if that were all he wanted. When he approached me, in August, it was because he not only wanted a teacher, he wanted an investigator. Someone from outside the school, who could be a fresh pair of eyes and, with any luck, be somewhat objective about what they were seeing. It speaks very highly of your friend that he considered her for the position.

“I agreed in part because, as I said, I owed him a rather large favor, but also because the individual the MLE calls the Faceless Man is foul in the extreme.” His face, passive through all this, twitched a bit as he said that, a reflexive grimace he couldn’t quite suppress. “Truly. I recognize you have only my word for this and, as such, it’s worth relatively little, but there are few men I think are more disgusting. I don’t know how much you know about his activities—”

“More than I want to,” I admitted before I could stop myself.

“Quite. Well. I’m not certain how I gave you the impression I might be working for him, but if there’s any way I can disabuse you of it, I would like to do so. I suppose I could get Alexander to tell you that what I’ve said is the truth.”

“I already know he trusts you,” I said. “With all this stuff, too.” It had been fairly obvious in the library, after the match, when he’d sent me away but not Thomas. “That doesn’t mean I do.” Especially with Lesley’s voice in my ear reminding me that the man the Aurors thought they knew might not exist anymore, not after whatever it was happened.

He just nodded, and I abruptly wished I had something to do with my hands. I envied television police officers with their files of incriminating evidence and notebooks to write things down in. “The, uh, the Quidditch game. Gryffindor and Slytherin. Where were you?”

“Using the opportunity to go through all the other professor’s rooms,” he said promptly. “It’s rare so many are out all at once; I could hardly pass up the opportunity.”

I frowned. “Are you still technically an Auror? Like, are you undercover?”

“No, I’ve been unaffiliated with the department for some time.”

“So, breaking and entering is…?”

“It’s only illegal if I get caught,” he said, and for just a moment, his lips twitched up into what might charitably be called a grin but was really more of a smirk.

“Sure it is, Mr. Ex-Officer of the Law.”

He smiled at me properly, a little more relaxed, and for a moment I considered throwing the towel in and giving up on this interrogation bollocks, but then I imagined what I would say to Lesley when I inevitably relayed this conversation to her.

_Well_ , I would tell her, _I considered questioning him further, but then he made a joke about breaking the law, and I gave it up as a bad job_.

No, I couldn’t see that going over well.

“Can you prove any of this?”

He sighed, a tiny soundless thing I only caught because I saw his mouth open and the movement of his shoulders as the air left him. “No,” he said. “I… Ah. Hmm. Possibly. Can we move this conversation to my office?”

That is definitely the kind of thing that routinely gets people killed in action films, letting the enemy get back to their home patch where they invariably have a million traps set up for just this situation. Naturally, like an idiot, I agreed. But because I’m not completely brain dead, only mostly, I did text Lesley to let her know that if I hadn’t gotten in contact by lunch tomorrow, Nightingale was probably evil, and I was probably either dead or a really disturbing chimera. I closed the notebook before she could respond, but I bet she was well pleased with me.

I did still have his wand, but a little voice in my head that had read and internalized all the Sam Vimes books informed me that he could very well have a second one and be lulling me into a false sense of security. I told it to shut the fuck up, but I kept an eye on his hands just in case.

They were very nice, for the record, more calloused than you usually get on wizards, who generally don’t end up doing all that much heavy lifting, having magic for that. I hated myself and my life a little.

Neither of us spoke on the walk over, just kept even pace with each other and nodded at students scurrying back to their common rooms before curfew. Stone hallways are awful for tense silences—they seem to magnify all the talking you aren’t doing, throwing it back at your ears in what I feel is a distinctly judgmental sort of way. Plus there’s the echoing footfalls. It was a bloody relief to get to Thomas’s, possibility of heinously fiendish traps or no, if only because it had some cloth and cushions to swallow up the sound of nobody saying anything.

“Right,” I started, because someone had to. “Why are we here?”

He nodded towards the door that led to his personal rooms. “In my bedroom,” he told me quietly, “you’ll find a number of bookshelves. On the third shelf down of the one on the left side of the bed, there’s a textbook titled _The Essential Defense Against the Dark Arts_. Take it down, tap it—with my wand, please—and say _Pavo cristatus_.”

I repeated it a couple times to be sure I had it right, and he added, after making sure I knew the pronunciation, “It’s the scientific name for the Indian peafowl, also known as the common peacock.”

Of course it was. “Not the nightingale?”

“Really, Peter,” he said, “I think that would be rather obvious, don’t you?”

He had a point. “So why peacocks?”

“No particular reason.” He shrugged his shoulders minutely, leaning back against the wall. “They’re utterly ridiculous birds, but I always rather liked looking at them.”

I put another tick in the ‘possibly gay’ column and left the room before I could embarrass myself. But I left the door open so I could keep an eye on him, because I’m not half as stupid as Lesley thinks I am, and it’s what she would’ve done. Well. She probably wouldn’t have gotten into that situation at all, if I’m honest, but if she had, it’s what she would’ve done.

I watched him watching me as I stepped into his bedroom. It was about what I’d expected: old-fashioned, scrupulously neat, everything put in its proper place—everything _having_ its proper place, even, I could tell there was a system—except that it had about a million more books.

“You know there’s a library in this castle, right?” I called back to him. “You didn’t have to bring your own.”

“I like mine,” he replied. “And this way, I never have to wait for someone else to be finished.”

I liked his, too. “Fuck me, is that a first edition copy of _Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them_?”

“Ah,” he said, sounding embarrassed. “Yes, I suppose it is.”

I’d be embarrassed, too, if I had to admit to being that posh. I’d only ever seen one of those once before, in a glass case at Flourish and Blotts with tasteful white notecard saying, ‘Price available upon request.’ You know it’s expensive when they won’t even tell you how much.

But I tore myself away and found, just where he said it’d be, Arsenius Jigger’s classic text for aspiring witches and wizards, and I gingerly pulled it off the shelf. It had actually occurred to me that doing what the possibly evil wizard said sounded like a fast way to a fate worse than death, but I couldn’t think of anything else to do. I’d already warned Lesley, after all, so I pulled out Thomas’s wand—mahogany, I thought, nine or ten inches, nice, classic—tapped the front cover, and said, “ _Pavo cristatus_.”

And the textbook cover melted away, and what I was left with was a bound dark leather journal, blank front, pages made of thick, creamy parchment. I glanced back at Thomas, and he nodded at me, so I opened it up and started paging through it.

Five minutes later, I sank absently onto the bed for added comfort as I continued reading. His handwriting was godawful, but all together, it was some of the most thorough, painstaking investigative research I’d ever seen. You could tell a Hufflepuff had done it. There were no hunches, no Eureka moments, nothing but solid, patient elimination of possibilities. I was impressed.

Which just goes to show that paperwork _can_ be sexy, if you do it right.

“Fuck,” I said. “You are a lot better at this than me and the seventeen-year-olds.”

“I should hope so.”

I looked up in time to catch him smiling at me, and I grinned back.

“So,” he said. “Proof. Or the best I can manage, at any rate. Does it satisfy?”

I worried at my bottom lip with my teeth. “You still could’ve faked this.”

“Yes,” he agreed. “At some point, Peter, you may just have to decide to trust me.”

And I realized, all of a sudden, that of course that was why I’d run my mouth when I’d seen him outside my office. That was why we were here. Because I’d wanted him to give me an excuse to just trust him. I’d barely even wanted the proof—just the excuse.

And maybe ‘proof’ was a loose word for what I had in my hands, and I wasn’t doing a good job of patiently eliminating possibilities, but it was like my dad playing jazz, following the line—I could follow this line, from meeting him to this journal to trusting him.

I grinned at him, still in the other room, and said, “You know, for someone so put together, you have the worst handwriting I’ve ever seen.”

“Put together? Peter, you flatter me.”

I chucked his wand at his head. “Come and tell me what this says, then, because I can’t tell if this is a g or an s or a five.”

And we sat together on his bed, and he did.


	3. Chapter 3

I was flying all the next day, in the kind of mood that usually requires having had exceptionally good sex or psychotropic drugs, and even Lesley trying to long-distance murder me or Sahra sniggering after I’d reported Professor Nightingale’s probable innocence couldn’t keep me down. What can I say? I don’t always get to, but I like trusting people. And I felt good about me and my intrepid seventeen-year-olds having backup of the sort that might actually know what it was doing.

(Lesley did tell me I was a moron and going to get us both killed, fired, or turned into something terrible, but it’s easy to tune out writing on a page—I didn’t even have to nod and smile. She finished the rant by lovingly informing me that she refused to take responsibility for my bullshit anymore and that I should leave the investigating to the professionals from now on. Fat chance of that, I did not tell her.)

I was listening to Dominic bitch about unicorns in the staff room, keeping one eye on Varvara in the corner, our most suspicious professor left—though I wasn’t counting my shady Hogsmeade encounter out of the running yet—and enjoying the heady feeling of having Thomas on the couch next to me, reading a book and gloriously on my side.

“Pure and good, everyone calls them,” Dominic said, prodding a large bruise and wincing, “but they’re vicious bastards, really. And the virginity bit’s _total crap_ and discriminatory to those of us who like a bit of fun.”

“How do they even know?” I asked. “And what counts for it, do you think? Like, if someone pulls you off in the broom closet, is that it, bam, no more unicorns for you? Or do you have to—get a bit more familiar, say, with someone before it really counts?”

Dominic snorted. “Can’t say I’ve ever tested it.”

“What we should do,” I said, warming to the idea, “is get together a bunch of people who’ve done one thing each—just frottage, or whatever, hands, oral, full penetrative—line them up, and see how unicorns like them each.”

“Can’t see you getting that one past the board of ethics, mate.”

“I’d like to see that call for research subjects,” Varvara said, laughing and looking slyly amused. “What would you ask for? Partial virgins?”

“Scientifically-minded individuals with varying levels of past interpersonal sexual conduct who are straightforward, honest, and interested in achieving accurate results to further our understanding of magical creatures,” I suggested.

She gave me a long look, up and down. “All right. That was nearly impressive.”

“Top marks for intelligent waffle,” Dominic agreed, slapping me on the back. “All right, Peter, you’re the mad scientist—say someone gives you a couple thousand pounds and tells you to go research something for a month and come back with a paper. What do you pick?”

“Standardized units for measuring magical energy,” I said immediately. “And a device or spell to accurately measure them. That’s got to be holding us back a good couple centuries in terms of proper testing and experimentation. I’d kill a man to get my hands on the kind of equipment Muggles have. You guys realize we have literally no idea how magic works? We’ve been doing this shit for centuries, and we don’t even know where the energy comes from. Can’t be from us, because your average wizard lives longer than a Muggle; can’t just be the wands, because we can do it without them in a pinch. Not that I could come to any actual conclusions with a couple thousand pounds—you’d have to give me hell of a lot more and a research team besides. So chop-chop, whoever’s funding me, more money.”

“Asking for extra cash is a key part of grant proposals,” Dominic agreed, and I remembered Lesley’d said he’d worked with non-profits. “I’d fund that. If I had any money, that is.”

“I appreciate your hypothetical support. Come on, what about you lot? What bit of magical theory are you going to drag kicking and screaming into the twentieth century?”

Varvara leaned forward in her chair, closer to the rest of us, and raised an eyebrow. “We’re well into the twenty-first.”

“My point stands,” I replied, and she laughed.

“Well, I guess I’m stuck with virginity sensing unicorns,” Dominic said good-naturedly. “Unless I can switch to ‘how the fuck are dragons considered aerodynamic,’ though better men than me have died on that hill before. Magical creatures isn’t a bad discipline for more scientific intellectual curiosity, actually—sure, a lot of the old stuff is bestiaries and natural histories, but most folks who like phoenixes like falcons too, so we do end up reading some of the Muggle literature. And working out what we should be doing. Besides, it’s hard to take care of anything if you aren’t willing to figure out where it lives and what it eats and whether its feces explodes.”

“You get a lot of exploding feces?” Varvara asked.

“You’d be surprised. What about you, then? Anything you’d like to study?”

I elbowed Thomas, and when he looked up at me, I grinned and said, “You too.”

“Oh—honestly, Peter, I’m really not very intellectual. I wouldn’t know how to scientifically study something if you gave me a—a—”

“YouTube tutorial?”

He sighed. “I don’t even know what that is.”

“I’ll explain later,” I told him. “Anyway, you can go after Varvara, but you’ve got to be able to come up with _something_.”

“You’re up, then, Tamonina,” Dominic said. “What’ve you got?”

“Really?” But she slipped her feet out of her flat shoes and slipped them under her on the chair, looking almost girlish and pleased to be in on the game. “Hmm. All right. The spark of life.”

“That seems broad,” Thomas said, apparently having been drawn into actually contributing to the conversation. “And not necessarily magical.”

“Not at all!” She straightened her back and clasped her hands in front of her. “Perhaps I said it wrong. All right—animal transfiguration is commonplace among witches and wizards. We can turn animals into things, but we can also turn inanimate objects into living, breathing, functioning animals, yes? So how? How on Earth can we create life with a wave of our wands? I’m honestly surprised we don’t get more religious students crying heresy, since I thought that was supposed to be the sole province of God. And—if we’re being formal—I think that by understanding how magic might mimic or become life itself, we will understand more of what magic truly is and, thereby, how it works.”

“That was lovely,” I said honestly. It was also stunningly unscientific, but then—wizards and the very unique education given by Hogwarts School. I count it as a win if we know the water cycle, and it wasn’t as if I’d gotten particularly rigorous about mine. “I actually had that thought, once, when a housemate’s Walkman turned into a bird while I was a kid here, but I could never figure out how you’d investigate it.”

“No, well, nor can I,” she said. “But it’s an interesting thought, all the same.”

“So far virginity and unicorns is the only thing we’ve got anything resembling an experimental procedure for, though,” I said.

“Probably why no one’s ever looked into any of this stuff.” Dominic shrugged. “Magic has all the questions, but none of the adults who ever learned how to apply the scientific method in school.”

“It’s not doing us any favors,” I agreed. “All right, Thomas. What are you interested in?”

I got a long-suffering must-I look in return, which I ignored, nudging his side again and potentially reveling in the fact that we were sitting close enough that it didn’t take all that much effort.

He sighed, shifting in his seat so he could face us all a bit better—which incidentally put his torso further from me, but his leg right up against mine, a long line of well-muscled warmth, so I called it a fair trade—and putting his book down on the coffee table. “Fine. Linguistics, I suppose.”

I think that surprised all of us. You don’t expect the Defense professor to be especially interested in talking things out, if you get my meaning, though I suppose that must actually be a pretty important part of real police work. And a fine body of men and women they are, who are doing their best with what they’re given, and if they happen to leave off talking in favor of beating a suspect with the phone book once or twice, I’m sure we don’t blame them.

Thomas must’ve noticed our reaction, though, because he looked a little embarrassed when he said, “I’ve always liked learning languages. And while we use Latinate spells, I know other continents don’t always, though they do appear to be doing the same actual magic. For the most part, anyway, in terms of wand motion and effect. And they can learn ours, and we can learn theirs.”

“But it matters if you mispronounce them,” I said. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Yes, precisely,” he agreed, and then he smiled at me—just me. “You’ll like this, Peter: I once had a friend who could do magic in Parseltongue.”

I took a deep breath. “Fuck. What? Like—he knew Parseltongue spells?”

“Not precisely,” he said. “The way David explained the language to me, he didn’t really know any of it. If he were looking at me, and I asked him the word for hello, or what have you, he couldn’t have even begun to tell me. But if he were looking at a snake, preferably living, though he could make do otherwise, everything he tried to say just came out in hisses. And if he looked at a snake with his wand out, and said _lumos_ , he got light. Only what he said didn’t come out as _lumos_. But the spell worked just the same.”

“Shit,” I breathed. “That makes no sense.”

“I thought you’d like it,” he said, giving me a delighted grin.

“I absolutely hate it,” I agreed. “There’s definitely a book there, and I want to read it.”

“Well, I don’t want to write it,” he said. “But if you ever find one, I’d be interested in a copy.”

Dominic snorted, and I remembered he was there. “None of us are actually going to be writing these,” he said. “Well, maybe Mr. Ravenclaw here, but the rest of us drudges are going to save our academic flights of fancy for daydreams. I haven’t got the foggiest clue how you’d go about testing any of this shit or even if there’s anything to test, and I get a funny feeling the boyfriend would get a bit tetchy if I started doing that on my days off instead of him.”

“Hey,” I said, seeing here a perfect opportunity to work into conversation that I liked men, “one of my ex-boyfriends liked it when I waxed intellectual in bed.” I thought I might’ve felt Thomas’s leg twitch against mine, but when I glanced over casual-like, he looked the same as ever. So maybe not.

“Fucking Ravenclaws,” Dominic said cheerfully. “Freaks, all of you.”

Out of habit, I glanced over at Varvara just to make sure she wasn’t going to be Schrodinger’s homophobe, though she’d always seemed fine with Dominic. She was frowning slightly, but I didn’t think it had anything to do with me, because she looked a million miles away and not like she was paying any attention to us at all.

I called her name a couple times, and she started and looked over at us properly. “Oh, sorry,” she said, waving a hand as if brushing away her thoughts. “I was woolgathering. Thinking about science, I suppose. Peter, if you come up with any experiments other than the unicorns, you ought to let us all know. I’d be happy to help.” She slipped her feet back into her shoes and stood, stretching. “But I really ought to be getting some grading done, and if I stay here, I’ll talk instead.” She gave us all a cheerful wave and headed out the door.

Dominic sighed. “She’s got a point. I’ve got my sixth years going into the forest to meet the centaurs and talk about what lives there tomorrow, and I’d better prep.”

Thomas and I wished him luck. I told him to try the thing with the unicorns with some of his students, and he told me that I could try it myself if I was so keen to get fired, and then he was gone and it was just the two of us in our little corner of the staff room.

“So,” Thomas said, turning an interested gaze on me. “Your tube tutorials?”

I could hear the incorrectly added grammar and space, and I wanted to kiss him for it, but I settled for trying to explain YouTube instead.

#

Working with Thomas meant I had to fill him on all my sides of the investigation, including Sahra and Jaget’s involvement. He didn’t exactly approve of me having teamed up with two teenagers, but I managed to work out a settlement by which he agreed not to inform Seawoll or Stephanopoulos that they were moonlighting as investigators, and they agreed not to go haring off after any leads without informing an adult.

“Not,” Jaget said, “that we have any leads to go after. Unless one of you two has something to share?”

“We could try to investigate my weird Hogsmeade encounter,” I said, without confidence. “Though I’m not even sure I could find her again.”

“We really ought to,” said Thomas, “though I agree that the how eludes me at the moment, and in any case, it may have to wait for a weekend. It’s rather difficult to get out of the castle without someone noticing. Mr. Kumar, didn’t you say that last year the…ah, suborned teachers had a particular interest in the seventh floor?”

“As much as they were looking anywhere in specific.” Sahra frowned, exchanging a look with Jaget, sitting on the couch in my sitting room with her. “Why, do you know of something up there? Secret passage? Terrifying weapon?”

“I know about a lot of the secret passages,” Jaget said. “And I can’t think of any interesting ones up there—just the usual, that dump you out in all the places you’ll never need to go. And please say it’s also a no on the terrifying weapon.”

“Hey, I’d be okay with it being a yes if we could use the terrifying weapon against that faceless bastard,” Sahra said. “It’s only bad if it’s not on your side.”

“The Boromir attitude to weapons of mass destruction,” I told her. “Yeah, that always works out great.”

Sahra groaned, but Jaget and Thomas just looked confused.

“Seriously?” I said to them. “That wasn’t even that geeky. It’s mainstream these days.”

Jaget shrugged. “My family’s all wizarding. I got the reference, I just didn’t understand the reference. It’s from the _Lord of the Rings_ , right? Only I never read the books or saw the movies, so I’m not sure what you actually said to her.”

I looked at Thomas, who sat back in his chair and crossed one leg casually over the other. With his robes and suit jacket slung over the back and his tie loosened a bit, he looked almost relaxed. Firelight glinted off of one of his cufflinks when he reached a hand up to neatly brush some hair out of his eyes. “I’m afraid I have to admit I have no idea what ‘Boromir’ is. Though I may have heard of the _Lord of the Rings_ at some point; it sounds familiar.”

“It _sounds familiar_ ,” I repeated. “It—no, never mind. It’ll take too long to explain. But remind me to lend you my copies later. I think you’ll like them.”

He looked over at me and smiled, just slightly. “If you say so, Peter.”

Sahra tapped my coffee table with a fingernail to get our attention, and I looked at her somewhat reluctantly. “Looking forward to the book club,” she said, once she saw we were attending, “but this is a bit off topic, isn’t it? Professor Nightingale, is there really a terrifying weapon on the seventh floor?”

“Not to the best of my knowledge,” he said, “but I was thinking—that is where the entrance to the Room of Requirement is.”

#

“I cannot believe,” Jaget said, for the second time, when we were all standing in a random corridor on the seventh floor, staring at a blank wall across from a tapestry of a wizard I was pretty sure was Barnabas the Barmy, “that there is a room in this castle that will give you anything you want, and I didn’t know about it.”

“ _I_ can’t believe no one knows where the hell it came from, how it does it, or how to make another one,” I said. “Or, I can, actually, and that’s the problem.”

“In my day it was—well, not _well known_ , but certainly if you knew the right people, it was something you were made aware of,” Thomas said, smiling somewhat reminiscently. “And exploited, naturally.”

I glanced at him and the softly, happily nostalgic look on his face. “What did you usually ask it for?”

“Oh, a safe place to get drunk, generally.” When he saw all of us looking at him askance, he sighed. “We were teenagers.”

“No, sure,” Sahra said. “We’re not judging the alcohol. I think we just can’t believe you were that uncreative. You said the place can give you _anything_ , right?”

“Within limits. It doesn’t do food, for instance.”

“It wouldn’t,” I said. “Gamp’s Law.”

“Right, but anything else?” Sahra stared at him. “ _Anything else_ , and all you wanted was someplace to get sloshed? I’m a teenager, and I still think that’s daft.”

“Yeah, but you also don’t drink,” Jaget said. “Maybe the rest of us would like somewhere to get sloshed.”

“I also used to use it as a practice room by myself,” Thomas offered. “It does obstacles, moving targets, things that attack you—I’ve never found anything else equal to it for that.”

“But it’ll do anything,” I repeated, in case he hadn’t gotten it.

“Yes,” he agreed. “I suppose I just haven’t much imagination.” He turned his head and met my eyes, something a bit challenging in the way his hands slid into his pockets and the set of his chin. “Why, what would you have done with it?”

I opened my mouth to reply, but about five things tried to come out of my mouth at once, and none of them succeeded: a lab full of all the equipment I’d need to actually measure magical power, a working television and every gaming console possible, an internet connection, a library filled with all the books that burned at Alexandria and then some, a spaceship, a really comfortable bed that I could push him down onto. Some of them would’ve gotten me mocked mercilessly for my own lack of imagination, a few I would’ve actually been fascinated to see if it could actually produce, and one would’ve made me march in front of that blank wall and tell it I needed a guillotine. Playing the odds, it’s maybe not a bad thing I ended up completely silent, choking out a couple unintelligible words. “A hell of a lot,” I managed at last.

“For instance,” Sahra said, “a really terrifying weapon?”

“You’ve got to get off that one, mate,” Jaget told her.

“I’m just keeping us on track. Seriously, could it?”

“Yes and no,” Thomas said. “I’ve no doubt it could supply you with a—a really terrifying weapon, if that’s truly what you decided to ask for, but you couldn’t remove it. While everything that appears in there is perfectly real and absolutely functional, you can only bring out what you brought inside in the first place.”

“Okay,” I said, “but why?”

“I’ve absolutely no idea, Peter.” He looked unconcerned, too—this wasn’t going to eat him up at night, he wasn’t going to have to go searching the libraries for information about magical constructs. “As with the answers to most of your questions.”

“See, on the one hand,” Jaget mused, folding his arms across his chest and eyeing the wall opposite us with interest, “I can’t think of anyone who wouldn’t find a room like that useful. On the other hand, I can’t think of any actual reason for the Faceless Man to find it useful.”

“But what actually happens if you try to take something it made out?” I said, and got three ‘really?’ looks in response, with varying levels of amused tolerance added on top. I soldiered on despite them. “Is there a barrier? Can _you_ get out? Does the thing disappear?”

“This is what you’re focusing on?” Sahra said.

I shrugged. “I’m willing to hear ideas for what I could be thinking about that would be more important. Anyone got any ideas for why an evil bastard might want it? No? Anyone got any ideas for what it could be for us that would help us figure out what an evil bastard wants? Anyway, I’m curious. If you won’t tell me, or if you don’t know, I’ll just try it myself.”

“No, you won’t,” Thomas said.

“Of course I will,” I said. “Hell, I’ll probably do it in the next five minutes unless someone comes up with something to distract me, and I might even then.”

“No,” Thomas repeated, “you won’t.”

That gave me pause, and that combined with the look on his face—mischievous, smug, and clearly very entertained by a joke that was probably at my expense—brought me up short completely. “Okay,” I said after a long moment of trying to figure out the trick, “I’ll bite. Why won’t I, exactly?”

He grinned at me, wide and delighted and almost laughing at the edges, an expression I was starting to identify as one preceding something he knew would give me a migraine. “You just won’t. You’ll go in, and you’ll really mean to, but on your way out, you’ll stop to look at something else and forget you put it down. Or you’ll trip and drop it and not realize until you’re halfway to your common room. Or you’ll realize _that_ wasn’t what you wanted to take, it was the other thing, and in exchanging them, you’ll manage to actually grab neither. Or you’ll set it down to tie your shoe, and one of us will tell you to hurry up, and you will, and…” He gestured with his open palm as if presenting me with something. “You get the idea.”

I did.

“What,” I said conversationally, “the fuck.”

“Yes,” he said, sadistically self-satisfied as the proverbial cat, “I rather thought that would be your reaction.”

“That is incredibly messed up,” Jaget agreed, neatly summarizing my spinning thoughts, “but I have a different question.”

“Of course,” Thomas said immediately, suddenly polite, professional, and professorial again. “By all means.”

“What would happen if, say, we told it that what we _really needed_ was the Faceless Man trussed up like a pig in vibranium chains?”

“You know Marvel but not Tolkien?” I said.

“I like superheroes.”

“Vibranium?” Thomas asked. “No, never mind, I think I understand the basic idea. At any rate, no, it wouldn’t work. It creates things; it doesn’t bring anything in from outside unless you do.”

“Okay,” Sahra said abruptly, “I’ve got an idea. Three times in front, right?” Without waiting for an answer from Thomas, she walked in front of us, closed her eyes as if to concentrate, and slowly paced back and forth in front of the wall. On her third pass, my vision blurred slightly, I blinked a bit of dust out of my eye, and when I looked again, there was a door—not like it had suddenly appeared, more like it had been out of focus, and now that I’d looked properly, it wasn’t anymore. It was as if my brain were telling me, _Oh, that? Yeah, that’s been there all along—don’t you remember?_  It was unremarkable, uninteresting, and totally infuriating.

“What did you tell it to do?” Jaget asked. He’d been following Sahra’s progress with interest, glancing at the wall often enough to have had the same thing happen to him as me, but he looked perfectly sanguine about the new and inexplicable door anyway.

“A picture of the Faceless Man’s face,” she said. “Thought it was worth a try, anyway.”

“It certainly is,” said Thomas with interest. “Imagination, indeed. I’d never thought of this room as anything more than recreational.”

After a brief debate about who got to do the honors, when Sahra, Jaget, and I all went for the door at the same time—Thomas hanging back like the gentleman he was—we got it open and all piled in eagerly. And then drifted to a disappointed halt.

Thomas was the first to speak. “Hmm. It’s an attempt, certainly. I wonder if it found the request unclear. ‘The Faceless Man’ is not exactly the most descriptive phrase, and in my experience, specificity in your desires helps considerably.”

“Interesting point. That’s definitely a picture of a faceless man,” I said. A man in a mask, at any rate. I didn’t know enough about the Faceless Man’s silhouette or dress to know if it was accurate or if it was just a picture of any man with his face obscured. “So—it can’t do it because we don’t know what he looks like, or because we don’t know who he is?”

“I’m not certain. Doesn’t it amount to the same thing?”

“No. If it’s the first, it’s literally just pulling things out of our heads and it doesn’t know—know, fuck, I’m talking like the thing’s sentient, though I guess in this castle, it could be—anything about the world outside of us. If it’s the second, it’s just, like you said, a specificity thing, and it could conceivably show us a picture of someone, even if we didn’t know what they looked like, as long as the room itself could be certain who we were talking about.” I thought about it. “That’s probably testable, actually. Anyone know what the head of the Japanese government looks like?” When I got a few head shakes, I said, “Do we have to go back outside?”

“No,” said Thomas, and then Jaget said, “Definitely no. Look.”

Next to the picture of the literally faceless man was another picture, which my mind was resolutely trying to convince me had been there the entire time, even though I _knew_ it hadn’t been. I studied it, a neat photograph of a middle-aged Asian man. But then, I could’ve guessed that much. “I’ve just realized the problem with this experiment,” I announced.

“Is it that, by necessity, none of us know whether that’s accurate?” said Thomas, sounding amused. “Yes, that does seem to be working against you.”

I sighed. “Yeah. But it’s just temporary. I’ll check it once I get somewhere with internet, and then I’ll know.”

“Professors,” Sahra said suddenly. “That door wasn’t there before.”

I looked where she was pointing, at the unassuming wood door on the far wall. Most of the room was unassuming, actually, presumably because Sahra hadn’t bothered asking for anything other than the Faceless Man’s face. Most of it barely rated notice: bare and empty, hardwood floor and whitewashed walls. And a dark wood door. I frowned. “Wasn’t it?”

“It wasn’t,” she repeated, but she sounded less certain now. “I…think?”

“This room does that to you,” Thomas said, reassuring. “If you think it’s new, it’s probably new.” Without waiting for anyone else to say anything, he walked across the room in a few long strides and opened it firmly. “It appears to be a passage of some sort.” He glanced back at us. “Were any of you wanting one?”

“Ye-es.” Sahra walked hesitantly forward to stand next to him and peer down the hall. “Actually. I was thinking I wished we could just go to Hogsmeade tonight and do something useful instead of dicking around with this room more, since my idea didn’t work.”

“Hey!” I said. “I’m not dicking around.”

“Yes, you are,” she and Jaget said simultaneously.

“I’m your professor!”

“Sorry, sir, but you’re kind of a terrible authority figure,” Jaget said kindly.

“What about Thomas—Professor Nightingale, I mean? Shouldn’t you be moderating your language around him or something?”

“He’s a much better authority figure,” Sahra agreed readily. “But I think we’re good.”

“He was a lot more intimidating before we saw how much he enjoyed messing with you about bringing stuff out of here,” Jaget muttered, and she shrugged in agreement, grinning.

I caught Thomas’s eye and mouthed, _Sorry_ , but his lips just twitched up into a wry smile, holding my gaze. He waved a hand as if brushing the apology away and said, “So, we believe this passage goes to Hogsmeade?”

“We’ve got a person of interest three of us have never even met,” Sahra said, jerking her head at the passage. “She might not be there to be found, but wouldn’t it be worth checking to see if anyone else in the village has seen or talked to her?”

“If she hasn’t been around much,” I agreed, “it would be a pretty good sign she’s not our villain. If you can’t stay in the school itself, Hogsmeade is basically the only place to mount an investigation on Hogwarts.”

“And the security on the castle is tight enough we would have noticed if she were trying to stay inside it on a long-term basis.” Thomas nodded. “It’s a decent idea, though I’d remind you she could be under Polyjuice or a Disillusionment. Especially now that she might suspect Peter would recognize her.”

“Wait,” I said. “Three of us have never seen her? Room, I need a picture of the woman who told me her name was Awa Shambir.”

“You don’t need to verbalize it,” Thomas murmured.

“It helps me think through what I’m asking for. There she is.”

The room had very obligingly provided a full-scale, full-body picture of my sketchy Hogsmeade encounter, photo quality. Sahra and Jaget took a good look, and Sahra nodded approvingly. “That was a good idea. It’d be annoying to always have to be wondering if I were walking right past her and not knowing it.”

“Yeah,” Jaget said. “Let’s get going, though. I don’t know about you, but I’ve still got homework to finish tonight.”

Sahra groaned. “Me too. Professor Nightingale?” He didn’t respond, and she frowned. “Professor Nightingale?”

I turned to catch his eye and saw that he was still staring fixedly at the picture I’d asked for, a focused look on his face and one finger fiddling absently with a cuff. I reached out and put a hand on his shoulder, and he blinked and looked me. “I recognize her,” he said.

“ _What?_ ”

“I can’t think what from, but I know I’ve seen her before.” He looked back at the picture on the wall, an annoyed set to his mouth. “Merlin. I thought it was another forty years before my memory was this bad.” He closed his eyes, concentrating. “It was…”

“Hogsmeade?” I suggested.

“No, that’s not right. Somewhere else, some time ago, it was…” His eyes snapped open. “It was King’s Cross Station.”

“That was why you were there that day when I met you!” I cried, the dots connecting. “‘In the area’ my fucking arse.”

“What? Oh, yes, quite. I wanted to see if anyone seemed unduly interested in the students or the train. At the time, I thought I hadn’t found anything, but now I think I might’ve been wrong. Your Awa Shambir was there, I remember now, near the platform. She hung around for quite some time, but she didn’t seem to be paying very much attention, and she was looking at one of those…” He sighed. “The bits of glowing glass Muggles carry around and always seem so absorbed in.”

“Phones,” I said, grinning. “Multi-purpose communication tools.”

“I thought phones were larger. And not terribly portable.”

I opened my mouth, but Sahra cut me off. “Explain the history of modern technology to him some other time. You’re sure it was her?”

“I am now,” he said. “I thought then she was just a bored Muggle waiting for a train or a friend, but I see I was wrong. I’ll have to keep that in mind in the future.”

“Okay,” I said. “I am making this woman person of interest number one. That is too many coincidental sightings to be believable.”

“I think you’re quite right,” Thomas said. “And I think that makes it even more imperative that we investigate her as soon as possible, so I recommend we be off.”

We all agreed, of course, so we ended up in Hogsmeade not half an hour later, after Jaget and Sahra had run back to their common rooms to change into outfits that screamed ‘Hogwarts student’ a little less loudly. There wasn’t much Thomas and I could do about our appearances, so we went as we were, and as we stepped out of the passage into an alley near Zonko’s, Jaget turned back and said, firmly, “I would really like it if this door stayed here until we got back, invisible and inaccessible to everyone but us. Please.”

“That’s an excellent idea,” Thomas said approvingly. “I’m impressed. I hope it works.”

“You really didn’t try much of anything with the room, did you,” I murmured to him as we made our way out onto the street.

“Would you believe it honestly never came up? When I was going to school, it was just a room we made trouble in without getting caught.”

“How did that happen?” I didn’t quite manage to keep the annoyance out of my voice, but I did stay quiet enough I didn’t think Sahra or Jaget heard me. “How does a room that interesting go from being somewhere kids just go to get drunk to somewhere I’ve never heard of from anyone? How did we stop knowing about that?”

“I think that it’s bec—” He cut off so abruptly that I looked around, half-thinking he’d seen the girl I was still calling Awa Shambir in my head, even though I knew it must be a false name. There were a few people out on the street we’d emerged onto, but she wasn’t there, and, after a quick and paranoid check, neither were any men without faces. When I looked over at him, inquiring, I realized it couldn’t have been something he’d seen, because his eyes were screwed shut, an annoyed look on his face, as if he were berating himself for something.

“Thomas?”

His face relaxed; his eyes opened. “Nothing. A passing thought. I’ve no idea why a shift like that might have happened—perhaps it simply fell out of fashion? A great deal has changed since I was at school.” His mouth twisted wryly as he said that, and I thought he seemed bitter.

“No idea,” I repeated, giving him a long look. He’d definitely been going to say something. He’d gotten four and a half words in. And it wasn’t ‘no idea.’ And I thought about pointing that out to him, along with the fact that he was cagey and a fucking liar, but the seventeen-year-olds were ten steps in front of us, and the fact was that I trusted him anyway despite myself.

And that I didn’t think I’d get a straight answer.

I grinned instead and said, “Yeah, me neither. If you come up with any theories, though, let me know, yeah?”

“I…” He sighed. “Yes, Peter. Of course.”

“Hey,” Jaget called back to us, and we caught up to talk to them. “What do you think, back to the scene of the crime? Three Broomsticks?”

“We ought to split up,” Thomas said. “We’ll attract less attention in groups of two than four, and we’ll cover more ground. The Three Broomsticks should be at least one destination of ours, but not the only one.”

“Hog’s Head?” I suggested. “And maybe the post office, though I can’t think anyone up to no good wouldn’t have more secure ways of sharing information.”

“Still a good thought.” Thomas looked between our two students. “One of you with each of us would be safest, I think.”

“Professor Grant and I can check out the Hog’s Head,” Jaget said, and Sahra looked at him, shrugged, and nodded. “And then you and Sahra could get the Three Broomsticks?”

Thomas hesitated, and I could see him weighing the perpetual hazard of being in the Hog’s Head over the fact that the Three Broomsticks was where I’d actually seen Awa Shambir. He clearly wanted to be wherever the most danger was, an idea I wholeheartedly supported. I had no illusions that my skills in a combat situation were going to be anything close to his, and if it came down to a firefight, I wanted to be standing behind him. Still, I thought if some place in this village were a risk, we weren’t going to know which it was until it popped out from behind a tree with a hex.

“Sounds fine to me,” I said. “We might drop by some of the shops that are open too.” When Thomas still looked uncertain, I joked, “If something happens, I’ll just blow the building up and you can come running.”

That made him smile. “It would certainly be an adequate signal. And I’ve no doubts whatsoever that you could achieve it. Your talent for uncontrolled destruction is unparalleled.”

“I have to be top of the class at something,” I told him. To Sahra and Jaget I said, “He’s exaggerating. I’m not that bad.”

“I am not, and he is,” Thomas said, and then he shook his head. “Very well. Miss Guleed, if you’d like to come with me, in that case?”

“Sure.” She nodded at me and Jaget. “Meet back here when we’re done?”

We agreed and headed down the road to the Hog’s Head at an easy, casual pace. Seeing students in Hogsmeade during the week was unusual, but Jaget was already tall and broad enough that he could easily be a recent graduate, though he was still shorter than me. “How’s your alcohol tolerance, by the way?” I asked as we neared the doors.

“Fair,” he said. “Hufflepuff throws the best parties, didn’t you know? Sahra doesn’t drink, though. It’s one of the reasons I thought I might be better off than her coming to the pub I’m pretty sure doesn’t have anything non-alcoholic, in case we have to order something.”

“I think we’d better,” I admitted. “People are more talkative after you’ve spent some money, and it looks more casual that way, like you’re just making conversation. Less like you came to pump them for information. That’s why I asked about it; I think it’s bad for my teaching career if I actually get you drunk.”

He gave me a quizzical look. “You hiding a secret second career as a private detective, mate?”

From ‘professor’ to ‘mate.’ I’d be worried about my authority as a teacher, except I was pretty sure I hadn’t got any and also that it was going okay for me. That Lesley had been, as always, right and that this was a job I could do. My students were going to pass their winter exams, and they were going to pass their spring exams, and the fifth years and seventh years were going to pass their standardized tests, and I had this. “I’m just very smart,” I told Jaget. “Hey, you respect me, right?”

He paused in the middle of reaching forward to push the bar door open. “Uh.” He eyed me, face going puzzled and wary. “Is this a trick question?”

“Nope.”

“Yes?” He pulled the word out into two uncertain syllables. “I guess? You know what you’re talking about, and when you don’t, you say so. So… Yeah. Sure. Why’re you fishing for compliments?”

“I’m not, honestly,” I said. “I just wanted to check. This whole year has been way out of my comfort zone. I’m making it up as I go along.”

“So you’re asking for feedback?”

“Pretty much.”

“In that case, you go off on tangents way too often, the theoretical papers you keep making us write are a nightmare, and laughing while you tell us all about how you used to make that mistake might make us feel better, but it’s not nearly as useful as telling us before we make the mistake would’ve been.”

“Ouch.”

He shrugged and grinned at me. “But we’ve had way worse.”

“Like all those professors who turned out to be working for an evil wizard, for one.”

“Just for starters,” he agreed. “We doing this?”

We were.

The inside of the Hog’s Head is dark, dingy, and welcoming to all those who might have something to hide or any reason to be shunned by normal society. It’s popular with thieves and underage drinkers, and it generally has a thriving black market going on in the booths and dark corners. On the other hand, Hogwarts professors have been known to frequent it when they want to avoid their students (or make sure their students aren’t there), so you don’t actually have to be a card-carrying member of the villain squad to get over the threshold, just willing to turn a blind eye to anything you might see while inside. Even the Aurors had started basically ignoring the place, if only because it was useful to know where most dark deals were taking place—that way they don’t have to go looking, see. Jaget and I didn’t quite stick out like sore thumbs, but we did get a couple wary glances before everyone went back to minding everyone else’s business. I knew they were still watching, and I kept it in mind as I walked up to the bar.

“Hi,” I said, though I took a care to not make it too friendly. “Two of the house brew?”

Wanda Pourier, bartender, owner, and, according to Lesley, perpetual innocent bystander and haver of plausible deniability, gave us a professional once-over. “Sure,” she said, in the same tone of bland disinterest I’d used. It didn’t pay to be too obviously attentive in this place. “Coming right up.”

The glasses she brought us were almost certainly not hygienic, and the liquid inside was only dubiously drinkable, but I was paying to have something to hold, not something to drink, so I forked over the sickles she charged me without complaint. Jaget took one, and I took the other, though judging by the way he grimaced at it, he was feeling as cheerful about actually taking a sip as I was. Still, I nodded my head at him and took a deep swig, holding my breath in hopes that it would mean I’d taste it less. Kicking me under the cover of our stools, in obvious retribution for having to be here, he did the same.

She nodded at us and left to refill someone else’s drink, and Jaget leaned closer to me so he could speak quietly. “Now what?”

I used my glass to block view of my mouth, just in case someone read lips, and said, at the same volume, “Now we make small talk for a while. We’re just here for a drink, remember?”

He groaned, but almost inaudibly. “Fine. You can help me with my Charms paper.”

I didn’t mind, so we talked about that for a while before Wanda finally came back to offer us another round, which we took. After she handed us the new drinks, she leaned forward to collect the old glasses and murmured, “You two are from the castle, aren’t you? What are you really looking for?”

I made a split-second decision. “Information.”

“Plenty of information here. But you know in this bar, you’ll have to pay, right?”

If Seawoll or the Aurors ever found out about this, I was so fucked. “Yeah. I know.”

She nodded. “All right. Why don’t you tell me what you’re looking for, and I’ll tell you who I think could help? Though, of course, what you do with that information, who you talk to, or how you pay is none of my business, and I had no way of knowing.”

I hated this bar. “Of course.”

“Wonderful. Now, what kind of information was it you wanted?”

#

When Jaget and I finally met back up with Thomas and Sahra, we weren’t happy, and by the looks on their faces, they weren’t either. Without a word, Sahra led us into the passage back to the castle, which had, in fact, waited for us to return—that room was infuriating, but amazing—and by tacit agreement, we were quiet until we made it back to the Room of Requirement. This time, instead of being bare, it had a number of comfortable looking chairs arranged around a flickering fireplace in a style old and classic enough I thought they were probably down to Thomas. Certainly he was the only one who didn’t look even slightly surprised to see them, just settled down into the nearest and gestured up at us expectantly.

“She’s working for the Faceless Man,” I said.

“Let’s not jump to any conclusions,” he said, but he looked grim, and I didn’t think he really disagreed except in principle.

“She’s definitely hanging around enough.” Jaget sat down, and we all followed suit. I ended up on the far side of the semicircle from Thomas, which unfortunately gave me a really good view of his face in the low light and the way the firelight reflected off those grey eyes. “And way too interested in Hogwarts.”

“And way too well funded,” Sahra said, leaning forward and bracing her elbows on her knees. “She’s been eating and drinking pretty well.”

“And not just for herself,” I said. “At the Hog’s Head, they said she’d been buying drinks for anyone who’d tell her anything about the castle, the students, the professors, or—for several weeks—anything about how to get in.”

Thomas looked at me. “How to get in? She didn’t ask about that at the Three Broomsticks, probably because it’s not the kind of information they’d know or share there. And you said for several weeks?”

“Yeah. Until she suddenly stopped a bit ago, like she’d got what she needed.”

He stilled and, maybe unconsciously, one hand went to where I knew he kept his wand. “Did she. And was this, perhaps, before the first Quidditch game of the season?”

“Funnily enough, it was, yeah.”

“Secret bloody passages,” Sahra spat. “Damn it.”

“They’re annoying, yeah. Some of the history behind them is actually really interesting, though,” I said, my mind half on what I was saying and half on wondering which Awa’d used to sneak in, ticking off the ones I’d found as a kid. “The ones we know about, anyway. Like that one behind the statue of Gregory the Smarmy on the fifth floor that so many people know about that it’s unusable. You know they think that’s probably one of the first passages out of this castle that got added? Probably completely revolutionized ward-building and protective enchantments—”

“Sir,” Sahra said, but I was on a roll now.

“—because those usually are defined around an enclosed area, you know, so if you have stuff that goes straight through them, it completely bollockses that up—”

“Professor Grant.”

“—so you’ve got to use these kinds of architectural and magical workarounds to make the enchantment think it _is_ an enclosed space—”

I stopped, but only because I’d been suddenly and unceremoniously drenched with a veritable torrent of water coming from directly above me. I coughed several times, wiped my eyes, and glared at Sahra. “What the _fuck_.”

She glared right back. “You had that coming. I don’t care about the history of secret passage building right now, unless you’ve got something that’ll tell us which passage got used, when, and by who.”

“Whom,” I heard Thomas say, but he sounded a little distracted.

“I don’t care about that either!”

Jaget had put his head in his hand, leaning against the arm of his chair, and was laughing at all of us. “Come on, Sahra,” he said through it, “you’re in his class too. Haven’t you learned to tune it out by now?” I flicked some water at him in retaliation, but he barely seemed to notice. “Mate, you look absolutely ridiculous.”

“That’s not my fault,” I muttered, but I stood up and pulled off my t-shirt, starting to wring it out, and then I turned to Thomas to try and solicit some sympathy. I stopped before I even opened my mouth to talk, though, because he was staring at me.

Or, not me. My chest, which was still dripping with water, and then his eyes slid lower, to where my jeans were clinging wetly to my legs, and I actually saw him swallow. There was color rising in his cheeks, and I thought, dazed, _I know what that look means_.

He seemed to realize where he was looking all at once, because his eyes snapped up to meet mine and stayed there, fixedly, and I knew what that look meant too. People make eye contact that sustained and rigid for only two reasons: either they’re customer service professionals who’ve recently been reamed out about it by some sort of fluffy community organizer type, or they’re trying very hard not look anywhere else—your unsightly physical deformity, for instance. Or, as it happens, your bare chest. I licked my lips, and his knuckles went white where they were gripping the arm of the chair.

I stared at him staring at me and felt dizzy, out of my head and off-balance with the realization that he was looking at me like that because he _wanted_ me. I saw his flushed face, the rise and fall of his chest, visible through his shirt and suit jacket, and it was like I was fourteen again, discovering I liked boys too and wild with hormones and adolescence. I felt positively Victorian, like if he so much as flashed a bit of ankle at me, I’d lose all sense of self-restraint. I wanted to dive across the room at him, I wanted to press him right against that chair, I wanted to climb on top of him and muss his hair, I wanted to get on my knees and kiss his inseam. I wanted to make him stand up and come to me with hot eyes and touch all the places he’d been looking at. I was soaked through with cold water, but I felt too warm anyway, and it wasn’t from the fire.

I opened my mouth to say—something, I wasn’t sure what, but it was almost certainly going to be stupid, though with the way he was looking at me, I wasn’t certain he’d care—and had to clear my throat a couple of times. And then wet my dry mouth. And then—

I was dry, just as suddenly and unexpectedly as I’d gotten drenched. I blinked several times and looked around the room, landing on Sahra, who was putting her wand away. “You were the one who soaked me in the first place,” I said.

“Yeah, but I wasn’t expecting you to enjoy it that much,” she muttered. “Put your damn shirt back on.”

Thomas shot to his feet like he’d been hexed, not looking at any of us. “It’s late,” he said, just a hair too loud. “We should all go to—to our rooms. We can talk about all of this tomorrow, and I’ll be sure to see if there’s any way we can increase security on the perimeter.”

“Thomas,” I said, but he ignored me, shooing the students out of the room. Belatedly, I pulled my t-shirt back over my head and hurried to catch up with them, confused and aroused and still wanting.

“It’s after curfew, so Professor Grant and I will walk you back to your dorms to make your excuses if you run into any other staff members,” he was saying. “Mr. Kumar, you can come with me, and Miss Guleed with Peter.”

So he definitely didn’t want to talk tonight, then. I sighed and nodded, capitulating. “Yeah, that sounds fine,” I said. “Safer, too, since now we know she can get into the castle.” It was an alarming enough thought to put a bit of a damper on my libido, and I fell into step with them without making a fuss before I suddenly stopped dead.

“Hang on,” I said. “Oh, fucking _come on_.” Everyone looked at me and then all around us in the hall, and Thomas rolled forward onto the balls of his feet, his hand sliding to his wand, like he thought I was going to say we were going to have to fight the Faceless Man right then and there.

“Why,” I said, “did you have to dry me off? We could’ve tried to see if the water made it out of the room! Why didn’t I think of that?”

They all stared at me.

“Bloody hell, sir,” Jaget said. “Politely, and with all due respect, there is something seriously wrong with your brain.”

“Look,” I said, ready to defend myself, but then I had to stop, because Thomas was _laughing_.

Quietly, more gasped inhalations of breath than anything else, but he had his face in one hand, he’d slumped back against the stone wall like his legs couldn’t hold him up, and his shoulders were shaking as he lost his normally impeccable composure. “Merlin, Peter,” he said, in between gasps. “The look on your face.”

“Look,” I repeated, and added, “I’m just saying,” even though I wasn’t. “Uh.” All I could think of was how it might feel to crowd him against the stone wall and kiss that smile off his face, to taste his laughter in my mouth. I was used to wanting, but it had been so long since I’d felt this overcome by someone else’s happiness, it’d been since—since I’d started dating Bev, really, and wasn’t that a terrifying thought, because under other circumstances, I might’ve married her.

He shook his head, still smiling, and said, “Sahra, let’s be off, shall we? We can leave Peter to his intellectual curiosity; he need suffer no more punishments from you.”

“ _Please_ ,” she said, practically dragging him down the hall with her.

I looked at Jaget blankly.

“Mate,” he said kindly, “you are so gone.”

He had a point.

#

Gone I might be, and in fact I woke up the next morning feeling very pleased with myself, but there was still the rest of my life to bring me back to earth. When I woke up the next morning to find that Lesley had texted me back a response to my message from the night before ( _I think Thomas Nightingale might have a thing for me_ ), I felt exactly as if someone had shoved me down and knocked the wind out of me.

All it said was, _Bully for you. Call me._

I cursed into the cold morning air, sending an angry burst of flame into the fireplace and tucking my feet back under my blankets. I had started to get up, but I suddenly felt much less motivated to do much of anything. Lesley and I had been talking about determinedly innocuous things since she’d reamed me out about the entire way I’d approached the whole ‘trusting Thomas Nightingale’ situation, and I got the feeling she thought it was safer for her that way. Her determination to speak of absolutely nothing had been worrying enough, and I was all too happy to keep our conversations to how crazy Abigail was driving me again and my love life, since I knew she must have a very good reason.

But I couldn’t ignore her, and if she had something important to say, I knew I probably needed to hear it, so I summoned a quill and a bottle of ink and balanced the notebook on my knees, on top of the covers. I levitated the ink, so that it wouldn’t spill or get in my way, dipped my pen, and wrote, _Same as last time?_

As I’d sort of expected, she wrote back immediately. _Yes. Sooner rather than later._

I rubbed my eyes with my hands, hard enough to make me see stars. If only all my mornings could start off this promisingly. _I have classes to teach all morning,_ I finally said. _Can it wait until after?_

_Probably. But make it today, okay? And give me a half hour heads-up. I’ve got things to do too._

It was important, but not an emergency, then. Maybe I’d get through the day without a crisis after all. Maybe whatever Lesley wanted didn’t even have anything to do with the Faceless Man. Maybe I could get the universe to put the danger and disasters on hold until I managed to ask Thomas Nightingale on a date.

Yeah, and maybe I’d fart rainbows and flowers and my fairy godmother would give me glass shoes for the ball.

I made myself get out of bed and pull clothes on and shave. I even made it to breakfast, though I mostly drank tea and pushed my food around the plate. Varvara gave me an assessing look and said it looked as though I hadn’t been getting enough sleep, and Abdul, on the other side of me, asked if I was all right.

“Huh?” I said. “Oh. Yeah, fine.”

“You really ought to try and eat something more,” he said, giving me his best stern look.

“Yeah,” I agreed, because it seemed easier than arguing I wasn’t hungry.

He sighed. “Thomas, can’t you do anything about him?”

“Thomas is avoiding me,” I muttered, because he was, and it wasn’t helping my mood any. It had rather crushingly occurred to me that just because he was attracted to me didn’t necessarily mean he wanted to date me, especially since I had a hard time believing I’d been subtle about my interest. Bev always said I had a tendency to run hot and cold, but she’d also said that even when I was cold, I was still pretty obvious about checking her out. So the fact that when I’d come into the Great Hall that morning, Thomas’d practically shoved Harold Postmartin into the only available seat next to him, where I’d clearly been heading, was not encouraging. He’d been very polite all breakfast, but he’d barely said two words to me unprompted.

“He’s what?”

I rubbed my forehead and shrugged. “Never mind, nothing.” Abdul being Thomas’s friend before he was mine, trying to have that conversation with him would’ve felt disturbingly like being in second year again—I like your friend, does he like me?

I heard soft conversation at my side, but ignored it and let Varvara draw me into a light discussion of the possibility of a Dueling Club starting next term—which she knew about apparently due to a rumor originating with Abigail Kamara. Varvara was teasingly interested, asking who Abigail had blackmailed to have convinced us that making her better at hexing other students was a good idea. Since that was a nearly accurate summary of what had happened, I made some awkward jokes until she gracefully changed the subject to what sorts of combat techniques would be appropriate to teach the students. She asked what I thought might show up in class—if I thought Thomas had a specialty or any particular style he favored, but I had to shrug and admit that other than ‘not wandless,’ I hadn’t a clue. We ended up just chatting for a while about Defense tactics, and I realized about halfway through that not only was I having to delve into the depths of things Lesley or Thomas had mentioned at one point or another in order to keep up with her, but that even so, she was seriously, seriously schooling me. I was impressed.

“Shit,” I said. “Are you sure you’re the Transfiguration professor? Did you and Thomas switch jobs when I wasn’t looking?”

“What,” she said, laughing, “a girl can’t be good at two things?”

“Yeah, but—I mean, damn. Most people don’t know that much about how strong Shield Charms have to be before they’ll block different varieties of curses. You’ve got to either be a secret geek or a costumed vigilante. I don’t think there’s much middle ground.”

She leaned towards me, jokingly conspiratorial. “Peter, we’re teachers. I don’t think the geek part is terribly secret anymore—the world may have cottoned on by this point.”

I grinned at her. “You know, we should hang out more.”

She looked briefly surprised, but then she smiled back. “We should. I ought to get to class, but I’m sure I’ll see you later on.” She hesitated briefly, her hands just hovering over the edge of the table as she paused in the action of stepping away. The smile widened. “Try and take care of yourself today, Peter. I’d hate to see anything bad happen to you, after all.”

I stared after her as she left, bemused, because _that_ felt like an odd thing to say. And then Abdul was getting up and switching seats with Thomas, who settled down beside me and drove any thoughts I’d been having about Varvara right out of my head. He looked inscrutable and put together and like I had absolutely no idea what was going on in his head.

“Peter,” he said quietly, “is everything all right?”

I hesitated, and then I leaned a little closer to him and said, voice down, “I might need to talk to you about something later.” He tensed, and I added, “About what you and me and Sahra and Jaget are looking into.”

“You and I,” he said, but it sounded automatic. “Have you learned something?”

“No, but I might. Can I come by your office later?”

He nodded briefly. “Eat your breakfast.” And he smiled, just slightly, and I smiled back, relieved, because at least it wasn’t the determined cold shoulder he’d been giving me all morning, the way you do when you want to preemptively turn someone down.

He gripped my shoulder for a moment, and then he got up from the staff table and left the Great Hall. Abdul moved back into the seat he’d vacated and crossed his arms. “All right,” he said, “be honest. What’s he done?”

I shook my head. “Nothing.”

He fixed me with some high-grade Scottish eyeballing. “Thomas may be my best friend, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to take his side, you know.”

I considered that. “I don’t think there’s really a side to take. But thanks.”

He sighed, and I shrugged and ate my breakfast and spent the rest of the day worrying about whatever it was Lesley had to tell me that she couldn’t trust to the notebook. And worrying about Lesley maybe breaking cover because she was trying so hard to save my dumb ass from whatever it was I’d landed myself in. And worrying about Lesley, period.

I didn’t manage to leave Hogwarts and get to somewhere with cell phone reception until all my classes were finished and I’d answered a few questions from fifth years about their OWLS—I wanted to tell them they had an entire semester, so they could probably relax and let me get on with things, but I was pretty sure that fell under the heading of bad teaching—so I was fairly tense by the time Lesley actually called me.

“So, how am I going to die?” I said.

“Apparently in the arms of Thomas Nightingale,” she shot back. “Fucked him yet?”

“No, and also, shut up, I might’ve been wrong. Why’d you want me to call?”

“You might’ve been wrong? You came to this conclusion, what, overnight?”

“Lesley.”

“Fine. I wasn’t going to tell you this, because I didn’t think it had anything to do with you, and also, I’m not fucking supposed to be telling you anything—I know you’ve got a team now, or whatever, but you know you can’t tell them where you got this information, right?”

“I know.”

“I’m serious. If you mess up whatever he’s planning, and he works out it was me that told you how, I probably won’t want to live through whatever he does to me.”

I leaned against a tree. “Maybe you shouldn’t tell me.”

“I definitely shouldn’t tell you,” she snapped. “But I’m going to, because I’m fucking bad at my goddamn job. Faceless is interested in snakes.”

“What?”

“Mostly mouths and throats, though it seems to me they’re all throat.”

I examined that information from all angles. “Okay,” I said, “but what does that have to do with me?”

“Nothing, I thought, but I was wrong, wasn’t I?” I could hear her annoyance through the phone connection, and I suddenly missed her, like I missed technology and my mum’s cooking and the other half of my brain. “He practically said so. Whatever this is, it’s about Hogwarts.”

“I can’t think how.”

“No, me neither. And if you find out, I don’t want to know. You know what I do want to know?”

I had a bad feeling, but I took the bait anyway, because I loved her. “What?”

“What the hell is going on with you and Nightingale?”

I groaned. “Lesley.”

“Hey, I think we’re both definitely aware that at this point, you owe me.”

She was right, just like she always was. “You really want to hear about this?”

“About how badly you’re failing to fuck your hot coworker? Yes, obviously.”

I told her, because I did owe her, and also it turned out I wanted to whine about it. If I’d been at home, I would’ve made her get me drunk and play a stupid video game with me while we talked. Since neither of those were options, I just stood there getting pine needles in my hair and complaining. As it turned out, I had a lot to complain about.

“You’re being stupid,” she said, the instant I’d finished.

“Right, but I wanted to talk about me and Thomas, so can we move on?”

“Ha, ha. You’re being stupid, because sure, he might think you’re hot stuff but not want to date you, _or_ , stupid, he might think you’re hot stuff and not know that you’re writing ‘Mr. Peter Nightingale’ in all your lesson planners. On account of you not having _told him_.”

“Bev said—”

“Bev had known you since we were eleven. Bev went through puberty with you. She wasn’t confused about whether you were into her, she was confused about whether or not you were more into me. Nightingale hasn’t got all those advantages. You’re not half as obvious as you think you are; no one is. My point is, you’ve got no idea what he’s thinking right now, because you haven’t bloody asked. Stop making assumptions.”

I squirmed. One day, I was going to tell Lesley about my personal problems and she wasn’t going to inform me that they were all my own fault. And be right about it. “So…”

“So—grab him, kiss him, and if he tells you to fuck off, then you’ll know.”

#

And then, with all of that in my head, I had to go and see Thomas Nightingale, because of course I did. He ushered me into his rooms without ceremony, looked at me seriously, and said, “Has something happened?”

 _Grab him and kiss him!_ the Lesley part of my brain insisted, and I sternly told it to wait its turn. Not that it wasn’t tempting, but I’ve got priorities. Apparently. “I know something,” I said, “and I know it’s true, but I can’t tell you how I know.” _So I guess this is where we find out how much_ you _trust_ me, I didn’t add.

“Ah,” he said quietly. “Peter, you understand that you telling me that already gives me some fairly strong suspicions?”

“Don’t think about it too hard,” I begged him. “Don’t try to figure it out. Please. I’m on the level, the information is on the level, so just pretend it was divine inspiration or a random brainwave. I wouldn’t tell you at all, but I can’t put all the pieces together and figure out what’s going on, and I’m hoping you can.”

The edges of his lips quirked up. “All right. You were visited by a sudden flash of insight into our case. I can believe that of you.”

I didn’t know how to interpret that, so I ignored it. “The Faceless Man is interested in snake mouths and throats.”

He blinked, opened his mouth, and closed it again. “What?”

“Right, that was my thought too. Except, on the way up here, I had an idea—Parseltongue, right? Snakes don’t have voice boxes, so they just make sound by blowing air through their mouths and throats, and why the hell would you be interested in snake sounds unless you were interested in Parseltongue?” I paused to see his reaction, but his brow was furrowed, and he didn’t say anything, so I went on. “And then I thought: he wants something in this castle, and he’s interested in Parseltongue, so what if it’s something of Salazar Slytherin’s? Something he needs Parseltongue to get to or to take.”

“That makes a good deal of sense,” Thomas said slowly. “Something of Slytherin’s he needs Parseltongue for…” And then he went chalk white and sat down, except it was more like his legs gave out under him—he landed on the coffee table, and other than throwing a hand out for balance, I don’t think he even noticed.

“No,” he whispered, staring into thin air. “Oh, no.”

“Thomas?” I said, crossing the room to him in a few strides and reaching out to grab his arm. I sat on the coffee table with him and tried to catch his eye. “Are we about to die? Does he have a Parseltongue doomsday device?”

He didn’t laugh or smile. I don’t think he even registered the joke. “That’s—it can’t possibly be that—” He shook his head and finally looked at me. “Oh, Peter, I have been very foolish.”

“Okay,” I said carefully. “I’m getting the feeling you think you know what he’s looking for. Can you catch me up?”

He closed his eyes and nodded. “I’m good friends with Molly, and I’ve gotten to know this castle very well. The only thing I can think of that you need Parseltongue to access is the Chamber of Secrets.”

I stared at him. My mind was racing and somehow still several laps behind wherever he was, floundering. “The—isn’t that a legend? I’ve read about it, but I thought no one had ever conclusively proved that it ever existed.”

“Oh, it exists,” he said flatly. There was something dead and defeated about his face, about his closed eyes, about the fact that it seemed like he still hadn’t noticed where we were sitting, even though his posture was ramrod straight. “I’ve been inside.”

“You’ve—” I shook my head. “We’re coming back to that. What would he want with the Chamber of Secrets? No one even knows what’s in there.”

“I imagine he does know.” His voice was bitter, and I didn’t like it. “I’ve no idea how he learned, and believe me, I mean to find out, but I doubt he’d have an interest in the place unless he had a fairly good idea of what he’d find.”

I took a deep breath. “Which is?”

“Well, for one thing, there’s a basilisk.”

Naturally. “They’re the giant snakes that kill you with a look, right? Yeah, I can see why Slytherin thought he needed one.”

“But as rare as they are, I doubt that’s what he’s after. A man with the connections and resources he’s displayed would hardly have difficulties acquiring parts, or even an egg, if that were truly what he wanted. No, I imagine he’s looking for the other thing hidden there.”

He didn’t say anything else, and eventually I had to prompt him. “Which is?”

His eyes had been closed through that whole conversation, but he finally opened them to look at me. They were wet, I realized with horror. “David’s lab.”

I was so surprised, I didn’t make the connection at first. “David—like your friend David? David Mellenby?” A nerve fired in my brain, and I sat up straight. “David Mellenby the Parselmouth.”

“Yes,” he said. “His research was sensitive, and especially after—people wanted to use it for the wrong things, so eventually, he moved it somewhere he thought only he could access. A place where you had to speak with snakes just to get past the door.”

“But he was the professor of Arithmancy,” I protested. “You said so. What would the Faceless Man want with that?”

“He taught Arithmancy. That wasn’t his only interest. He was researching—” Thomas shook his head and stood abruptly, pacing back and forth across the room. “It started out as werewolves. He was trying to cure lycanthropy. Maybe he could’ve done it; I’ve no idea. I never understood any of it. But that led him to look at other ways you could hybridize people and animals, thinking that if he understood how to achieve such a thing, he could understand how to undo it—” He stopped talking, but I didn’t need to hear any more.

“Yeah,” I said, my lips feeling numb and difficult to move, like an out of body experience based on pure horror. “I can see why you think the Faceless Man would want that.”

“And it’s not even—the fact of his research wasn’t a secret, so there are any number of ways he could’ve found out about it. That’s one of the reasons David had to hide his lab, because people did know about it.” He executed a particularly sharp turn and stopped moving, bracing himself with one hand against the wall. “I am such a fool. I should’ve done it.”

“Done what?”

He looked at me, and I had a bad feeling just from the look in his eyes, even before he opened his mouth. “Destroyed it.”

My ears rang. I thought I’d heard him wrong, but one look at his face, and I knew I hadn’t. I took a deep breath and didn’t immediately start yelling at him, which I like to think showed some amount of restraint on my part. He was emotional—that was okay, he didn’t really mean it. I just had to make him think it through. “Destroyed it. Destroyed the Chamber? The lab? The research? Are you completely—” I bit my lip. All right, so I might’ve been a bit emotional too, but sudden terror will do that to you. “Are you absolutely sure you’ve considered all the implications of that fully?”

The set of his jaw was implacable, and he didn’t so much meet my eyes as look straight through me, into some far-off distant regret and certainty. “I should’ve done it after he—after he died, but I was too sentimental.”

“You were—no. This is not about sentiment,” I said, getting to my feet. “Thomas. You just told me that you think, if he’d continued his research, he could’ve _cured lycanthropy_. Are you hearing yourself? Can you imagine what that would mean? He might be dead, but there are people who could use research like that, who could use it to finish what he started.” I tried to moderate my tone, taking a couple steps closer to him, practically pleading. “Do you really think, if he were still alive, he’d want all of that knowledge to be lost with him just because you’re scared of what one man might do with it?”

“Yes.”

“Yes,” I repeated. “Yes?”

“Yes, I think that.”

“You can’t be serious.”

He looked me dead in the eye then, and I realized that this wasn’t an errant thought, this was something that went straight through to the steel core of him. “I think if he were still alive, he’d do it himself.”

“Like _fuck!_ ” I yelled, and officially lost my temper. “I might not be a proper scientist like he was, but that is his goddamn legacy, his history, what he poured his life and soul into, and you think he’d stand here and go, ‘yes, Thomas, get rid of it, it’s not important to me’?”

“It’s the reason he _died_ ,” Thomas said horribly, and I should’ve stopped there, but I was on a tear and not listening.

“If you got rid of any new knowledge that could be used to hurt people, we would never learn anything,” I said. “Everything can be used to hurt people. Maybe you don’t understand that, but I do.”

“You don’t understand anything—”

“I understand that you loved him, and he died, and you’re trying to erase him from the universe like it’ll stop hurting if you do!” He jerked backwards like I’d slapped him, but I kept going anyway. I don’t think I could’ve stopped if I’d tried. “You can’t bury your head in the sand and hope that the bad parts of life will go away if you ignore them! He doesn’t deserve to have his contributions, his work, erased because of your fear. Whatever’s in the Chamber, it meant something to him, he deserves to have that—”

“He deserved to _live_.” He inhaled slowly. “But he didn’t. I did. And pardon me, but I don’t think it’s your decision what to do with what he left.”

“Well, pardon me, but I don’t know that it’s yours either,” I said. “Did he leave it to you? All that work he did that you want to get rid of so badly, did he leave it to your responsibility?”

His mouth twisted bitterly. “He didn’t leave anything to anyone.”

“Then it doesn’t belong to you, so it’s not your fucking choice to just destroy what sounds like years of effort and knowledge—”

“It is if I’m the only person alive who knows where it is and how to get in.”

That brought me up short, and I stopped talking, breathing hard. I hadn’t realized how loudly I’d been yelling. “And that’s that, is it?”

“Yes. That’s that.”

“Well, fuck you too, Thomas,” I said, and I walked out.

#

I stalked through the halls without seeing where I was going. I wanted to call Lesley, but she didn’t want to know, and I couldn’t put her in more danger than I already had. I wanted to call Beverley, but I’d have to explain from the beginning, and I was worried she’d agree with him anyway. I wanted to tell _someone_ , but the fact was that it wouldn’t matter if I did: I didn’t even know where the Chamber of Secrets was, and Thomas was right. I couldn’t stop him from doing whatever the hell he wanted. I was powerless, angry about it, and wishing I knew enough about the lore to have even the slightest idea where I could find a secret room made by the least popular founder of the school.

I ended up in the library, because of course I did, but when Harold Postmartin asked me if there was anything he could help me find, I hesitated instead of telling him I wanted to know more about the Chamber of Secrets. People had been researching the place for centuries, so how likely was it that I could find it in an afternoon just because Thomas said it really did exist?

“Actually,” I said slowly, “can I just sit in the records room and have a look in there?”

“Again?” he said, surprised. “Another friend you don’t remember?”

“No, it’s—sort of. It’s a long story.” I didn’t have it in me to come up with a good lie just then, but I smiled and tried to appear calm. “Can I just have a look?”

“Of course, always happy to help.” He pulled out the key and made to go into the room. “What are you looking for?”

“No,” I said. “I mean, thank you, but—can I just go in? And sit in there and explore? I’m not absolutely certain what I want to find.”

“Well, that’s…a little irregular.” He paused, and I waited. “But I suppose I don’t see why not. There’s nothing in there you aren’t allowed to look at. If there were, we wouldn’t have it.”

“Thanks,” I said, as he opened the door for me.

“Of course. You just let me know when you’re through.”

I assured him I would and closed the door once he’d left, looking around the small room filled with the history of Hogwarts. I finally understood what Awa Shambir had been doing here during the Quidditch game: the same thing I was about to do. I couldn’t find the Chamber of Secrets, and I couldn’t stop Thomas from destroying what was inside; I couldn’t tell anyone what was going on, and I couldn’t save years of research that no one, to the best of my knowledge, had ever recreated. But I wanted to know David Mellenby, as well as I could, and he’d taught here. I wanted to know the kind of man who would destroy his own work just because someone, somewhere, might do something bad with it. The kind of man who would do it himself before he even tried to protect it, if Thomas was right.

Hogwarts keeps records on everyone who’s ever worked or gone here, like a cross between the paranoid Aurors and your proud grandmother, and while I wasn’t quite sure when Mellenby had taught, I thought it couldn’t possibly take that long to find out. How many professors of Arithmancy could there be in the last twenty or thirty years?

By the time I reached the 1980s, I was confused; by the time I reached the 1960s, I was confused, angry, and convinced Thomas had lied to me. I started to tear through the rest of the files, because I had to believe that David Mellenby was somewhere in this room, here to be found, that someone I was rapidly starting to understand I cared about in deep, embarrassing ways hadn’t made him up wholesale. I even looked at the names of the professors of other subjects, fruitlessly, and I couldn’t understand it, or I didn’t want to. I’d known, of course, that Thomas was habitually keeping things from me, but I’d thought—I’d thought he was bad at it. And I hadn’t thought he was lying about anything really important. Not anything he cared about.

I kept looking out of some sense of thoroughness and a desire to find out he had been telling the truth after all, which is how I found it at last.

David Mellenby, Professor of Arithmancy, 1929-1945. Head of Slytherin House starting in 1934, died 1945, just after the end of the Second World War.

Someone Thomas Nightingale had loved, dead more than seventy years ago.

I didn’t believe it. I couldn’t. And I went right on not believing it until I remembered that picture I’d seen in Thomas’s gradebook: that old, odd picture. A fad to take photos that looked like they were from the 1920s, he’d said, an old meme. Right. Because it _had been_ the 1920s.

“Thomas, you fucking bastard,” I whispered.

Mellenby’s professorial file was linked to his student one, so I activated the charm and summoned that too and went through them both together. Born 1897, graduated 1915. Slytherin, top marks in all the subjects he took, prefect. A few clubs, mostly either academic or those ones parents make their kids join, with names like ‘Youth Leadership.’ A few disciplinary marks for pranks and rule-breaking, but nothing serious. Hogwarts files update automatically, so it didn’t stop there: old enough to be conscripted in World War One, but no service record until the second, probably because it looked like he’d been snapped up by the Department of Mysteries the instant he’d left school. They would’ve gotten him out of the draft, easy. He’d worked as an Unspeakable all the way up to applying and being offered the Arithmancy post in 1929. Most of the notes in his file from professors and, later, the then-Headmaster, said things like, ‘brilliant,’ ‘a keen mind,’ and, on occasion, ‘genius.’

I tried to connect the man I was finding here, the clever, responsible, apple of his teachers’ eyes to the smirking man I’d seen in Thomas’s picture, and then that man to the one Thomas seemed to remember so painfully.

Thomas.

If David Mellenby was here, Thomas Nightingale must be as well.

Wishing again that the damn things had pictures, I tried to think through the situation methodically. He and Mellenby had looked within a few years of each other in the photograph I’d seen, and while that combined with the early forties man I’d seen half an hour ago made a firm case against natural aging, he’d definitely gotten older at some point—if he were a vampire, and believe me, I was trying to remember if I’d ever seen him in the sunlight just then, it had happened after that picture had been taken. So, despite my growing conviction that logic had nothing to do with any of it, the likelihood was that they’d been at school at around the same time. I did again what I’d unsuccessfully done with Awa Shambir, and pulled out all the graduating classes within five years of Mellenby’s. There were no Nightingales of any sort (though there were plenty of Thomases, it being a common name), so I slowed down and skimmed through each student’s file individually, looking for anything I recognized.

It did occur to me to check his faculty file, but that took me a grand total of about five seconds, because it was practically empty and linked to nothing and no one—a bit of a red flag right there, if I’d still needed one.

In the eleven graduating years I was looking at, there were eighteen boys named Thomas. Six of them were in Hufflepuff. Four died in World War II. Of the pair remaining, one had become a tailor, taken over the family business in Diagon Alley, eventually retired to Greece, and died of natural causes in 1982.

The other had entered Magical Law Enforcement directly after he left school in 1918 and become an Auror, at which he’d apparently excelled. He’d been appointed head of the department in 1946, after coming back from the war covered in medals. He’d also been a registered Animagus, and his form was a nightingale.

This Thomas was nothing like Mellenby. He’d been a Chaser on Hufflepuff’s team his last four years at school, but there was no prefect appointment for him, not with a disciplinary record any troublemaker would’ve been proud of. Other than that, he’d only been a member of the Dueling Club, but I got the impression from professor evaluations that he’d been relatively popular. They didn’t waste time on his social life, though, nor did they spend the ink waxing rhapsodic about his intelligence. Instead, almost every single report used the words ‘natural talent,’ and he’d aced the practical portion of every single OWL and NEWT he’d taken. I got the distinct impression he’d been a genius of a very different sort.

I use the past tense, because there was a note in his file saying he’d died ‘in the line of duty’—this despite him having retired some five years before—in 1978.

What a load of bollocks.

As it turned out, I didn’t need a picture to know I’d found out what that very, very classified Auror file had been hiding from Lesley. All I’d needed was a nice smile for the school librarian, a lot of persistence, and a willingness to believe the impossible.

#

I was still sitting there on the floor, poring over every inch of those files and getting a cramp in my lower back, when Thomas came in the door and stopped dead. I looked at him, and he looked at me, and I thought, _This man was born in 1900. He is older than my grandparents._

“Peter,” he said carefully. “I was looking for you.”

I think things could’ve gone two directions from there. He was looking at my face, not the papers I had spread around me, and it would’ve been easy to send all of them back to their proper places with a wave of my wand. My cleaning spells are pretty excellent, if I say so myself. And I could’ve told him I was looking for Awa Shambir again or even just that I’d needed a quiet place and something boring to read while I cooled down, and he wouldn’t know—not for sure—that I’d been doing anything but what I said. I could’ve gone back to not trusting him and lied to him the way he’d been lying to me. It is, I think, what Lesley would’ve done.

So it’s probably the stupid choice I was making, when I held out the first page of Thomas Fawley’s file to him and said, as evenly as I could, “You might’ve been looking, but I think I found you first.”

He went very still, and it was with great economy of motion that he reached out to take it from me with one hand. He stared down at it, and then he looked at the floor where the rest of it was, and David Mellenby’s next to it. He crouched down, touching some of the pages with gentle fingers, almost unconsciously, as if he were checking to be sure they were there.

“What I don’t understand,” I said, and this time I did hear my voice shake, “is why you would use Nightingale. I’d think it would be a bit obvious.”

He raised his head and looked at me again, met my gaze with those grey, storm-cloud-looking eyes, and I thought he was going to ask me what I was talking about. I thought he was going to ask me who Thomas Fawley was and why on earth his good friend David Mellenby’s birth and death dates were all wrong, and then I’d pretend to believe him, but we’d both know, and that would be that. I know he considered it.

But instead he sighed, almost silently, and his shoulders slumped, and he shifted to sit next to me, stretching his legs out in front of him with his ankles crossed and leaning back against the wall. He gathered the pages of Thomas Fawley’s student file, straightened them neatly, and piled them in his lap with his hands folded on top of them. “It’s only obvious if you think people are at all likely to consider the possibility that you’ve aged in reverse,” he said. “You’d be amazed how rarely that comes up. Besides, I thought I was more likely to respond to it. By that point, I was being called ‘the Nightingale’ by my colleagues so regularly it almost felt like a name.”

I took a deep breath. Knowing was one thing; hearing him say it was something else. “ _How?_ ”

He reached out a finger and tapped that death date on file. “I’d retired in the early seventies,” he said, and it was somehow still a shock to hear him say that, “but I was still asked to come in on occasion. I had so much experience, you see, and I still had all the requisite clearances, and it was simpler, sometimes, than going through old files. I didn’t mind. It was—” He paused. “I suppose I didn’t have anywhere else to go.” His voice was very quiet, and I’m not certain he was really saying it to me. He shook his head. “At any rate, I was asked to consult on something in the Department of Mysteries. An artifact they’d picked up that might have something to do with one of my old cases. I went, and then I…had an accident of sorts.”

“An accident.” I looked as his dark hair and lightly lined face. “With the artifact?”

“No. Well, maybe.” He leaned his head back, and I heard it knock against the wall. “To be perfectly honest, Peter, I remember very little of it. The item they’d asked me to have a look at may have been a factor, but the accident, I was told later, had rather more to do with the Time Turners someone had been experimenting on.”

“Ah. Huh. You know that’s not what they do, right?”

“That has been made quite extraordinarily clear to me, yes. Not that this is what they did at first, when they apparently broke all over me. I breathed in quite a lot of the dust, and the next thing I knew, I was about sixteen. And then thirty. And then five. And then eighty. And then—you get the idea. No one could figure out what had happened, but they were, naturally, quite desperate to. As you say, generally, time turners move you through time, not time through you.”

Which was a poetic but horribly inaccurate and unscientific way to put it, but I let it slide. “But that’s not happening anymore,” I said. “I mean—you’ve been this age the entire time I’ve known you.”

“Yes.” He hesitated. “They couldn’t figure out how it started, and they couldn’t figure out how to stop it, but the changes became less and less frequent, until finally, sometime in the nineties, they stopped entirely. At this age. I’ve no idea if that was luck or something they were always heading towards. I don’t know anything at all, in point of fact, but I don’t like to look a gift horse in the mouth.”

I opened and shut my mouth a couple times before I managed to work out which question I wanted to ask first. “It stopped at this age sometime in the nineties.”

“Yes.”

“It’s not the nineties anymore.”

“No.”

“Well past, in fact.”

“Yes.”

“It stopped _at this age?_ ”

He winced. “Yes.”

I regretfully let go of the idea that he was going to change his mind about this. “So…you’re not aging anymore? At all?”

“It certainly seems that way.”

“Jesus _fucking_ Christ.”

He looked amused for the first time since he’d walked into the room. “I highly doubt he had anything much to do with it.”

“Are you immortal?” I demanded.

“I don’t know, Peter,” he said, sounding tired. “I don’t know much of anything. I could be, I suppose. On the other hand, I could wake up at my proper age tomorrow and die instantly. Each seems to be equally likely, last I talked to the Department of Mysteries about it.”

His proper age being over a century, that would probably kill him, yes. I rubbed my forehead and changed the subject. “Then you don’t know for certain that it stopped? If they think it’s just as likely that your age could change again tomorrow?”

I saw him pause, and then, like a shift in his posture, make a decision. “Logic says that no, I have no idea,” he said, “but…” He glanced at me, swift. “You may not believe me; Molly was certainly skeptical enough, but I felt something happen. I would swear I did, though I can’t describe it. Like the world had opened up. I have no idea what’s happened to me, but I’m certain that part is over.”

“Molly?” I said. “I think you’ve left out some key parts of this story. Like, for instance, everything that happened between your ‘accident’ and ‘sometime in the nineties.’”

His mouth tightened. “It’s not a terribly pleasant story, I’m afraid.”

I said nothing, but tried to make it clear with a suitably expectant silence that pleasant or not, at this point I had better hear it, and after a moment he rolled his head on the shoulders and looked at the ceiling. “All right,” he said. “After the…incident, I was somewhat helpless. Especially at first, when the changes happened frequently. At any moment, I could be either a very old man or a child. Besides, the Department thought they could fix it, or at least figure out why it was happening. I stayed there, letting them run tests.

“Eventually, after they gave up on reversing what had happened, I was declared dead.” He shrugged. “I didn’t argue. If they had succeeded after all, it wouldn’t have been the first time an Auror had that paperwork changed. Eventually, I—” He paused, and I could see him change his mind about what he’d been about to say, but I kept quiet. “Eventually, while they hadn’t given up on recreating the results, and indeed, I doubt they have even now, they reached a point where there wasn’t much in the way of further data to get from having me there. My transitions were infrequent enough that I wasn’t quite such a danger to myself, and it was decided that I could leave and—well, not start a new life, since my age was still changing without warning. But be elsewhere, at least, as long as I had someone to look after me.”

“Molly,” I said, and he nodded briefly.

“I hardly thought she would agree. To the best of my knowledge, she had never before left Hogwarts since becoming caretaker a very, very long time ago. But we had got along when I was in school, and I was…old, no matter how I looked. And my strongest interpersonal relationship had, for years, been with my job. Most of my friends were dead, in need of caretakers themselves, or younger Aurors with their careers to think of. I wrote to her, and the very next day, she showed up and took me home.” A small smile touched his face. “I think she was personally offended by the job the department employees had been doing. And so for years, she took care of me, whether I was ninety or three. And then it stopped, and once I’d convinced her it truly had, she left and came back here. And eventually, so did I.”

I thought of all the things he wasn’t saying, the silences and elisions and that sentence he hadn’t finished. “How long were you with the Unspeakables for?”

“Oh, some time, I suppose,” he said, suddenly so casual that I became immediately suspicious.

“Thomas.”

He shook his head. “I might be immortal, Peter. Without the application of Dark magic, unicorn blood, or the Philosopher’s Stone. I can hardly blame them for being interested.” He brushed his thumb over the printed letters of the name ‘Thomas Fawley’ on his old school file, and then he set the papers aside. “I apologize for not telling you.”

“No,” I said quickly. “You were born in 1900, and you might be immortal, and for a while after that happened, you got locked up in the Department of Mysteries and experimented on, because Wizarding Britain hasn’t invented civil rights yet.”

He huffed, sounding exasperated. “That’s not—”

“Seriously, did you know people can go to Azkaban without trial?” I said. “Civil rights. We should get on that.” He sighed at me, but I ignored him, because I was right and we had other things to discuss. “I get why you wouldn’t tell me that. We’ve known each other a couple months; _I_ wouldn’t tell me that yet, I think. You told me when I asked: that’s what matters.” I took a deep breath. “That’s not what I’m mad about.”

He went still. “Ah.”

“Yeah.”

We sat there on the floor of the records room in a long moment of silence. My bum was getting numb and my back was starting to ache, but I stayed where I was anyway, and so did he. He rubbed a cufflink with one finger, and then he said, without meeting my eyes, “I know I upset you, Peter. I came to find you because I was worried, and because I wanted—”

“To make up.”

“Yes.”

“But not to apologize?” I said.

He hesitated, and I knew I was right. “Peter, I understand your perspective, I do—”

“Wait,” I said. “What do you think I want you to apologize for?”

People only ask questions like that when they think you’re wrong, and I could tell he knew it, because he got that slightly panicked ‘oh fuck what is the right answer’ look I occasionally inspire in my students. Like them, after a period of desperation, he tried to hedge his bets and get out of responding. “We argued,” he said.

“Yeah,” I agreed, having none of it.

Valiantly, he continued. “About what to do with David’s research. I know you disagree with me, but—”

“Yeah,” I said, “no. I may be upset about your opinion, but I don’t need you to apologize for it.”

He shifted and then sighed. “Then I have no idea. And I will apologize for that, at the very least, because I have a feeling I should.”

It was a disappointment, but one I’d been expecting. I drew my legs up, crossing them and moving to sit on a different part of my bum. “Okay,” I said. “I want you to apologize for treating me like I didn’t get an opinion the minute I had one that was different from yours. I get that this is personal now for you, but no matter how many decades older than me you turned out to be or how much time you spent running law enforcement, I’m not a kid or your subordinate. Either we’re doing this together, or we’re not. And if we’re doing this together, you don’t get to just shut me down because you don’t like what I’m saying.”

He didn’t respond, and I added, “And for the record, I’m sorry for losing my temper so badly. I said some pretty shitty things, and I shouldn’t have.”

He nodded slowly. “Thank you. And you’re right about what I said.”

That was a relief.

“I shouldn’t have behaved so peremptorily,” he continued. “It was inappropriate and unfair to you. I’m sorry, Peter.”

I let out a long breath of air. “Okay,” I said. “Thanks. Apology accepted.”

“But,” he said, “I’m not sure you fully understand _how_ personal this is for me.”

That was probably a sign he still thought he got dibs on having the biggest opinion, and I gritted my teeth and then had to remind myself to relax, because I was a mature adult. “Okay,” I said. “Can you explain? I’ll try to do less yelling this time around.”

I got a shadow of a smile for that. “Yes. It’ll be easier now, in point of fact, since I don’t have to talk around…” He waved his hand at the papers still surrounding us. “All of this.”

“Because you won’t have to pretend David Mellenby taught here recently?” I said, confused, since I couldn’t see why that would matter.

“No,” he said, “because I can tell you about the war.”

David Mellenby had died in 1945. “This is the second one, then?”

He nodded, looking far away. “David was hired by the Department of Mysteries almost the second he left school. They headhunted him. He was, in many ways, exactly what they looked for in employees: brilliant, creative, and secretive. I think, however, that they misjudged his…” He shook his head. “He left, eventually, because he didn’t like the direction they were trying to push some of his research, and Hogwarts was willing to fund and feed him in exchange for talking to children about subjects he adored. He was able to study what he wanted, with less pressure from his superiors to turn that to benefit them. And then…” He looked to the other side, away from me, but I saw his jaw clench. “Oh, Peter, he was clever and charming, and he could be terribly manipulative and, if I’m honest, an inveterate liar, but I think he saw academic study as something purer, something that ought to be free of all that. No matter his experiences with how his colleagues wanted to use—”

He shook his head, cutting himself off briskly. “Well. It hardly matters at this point. Suffice to say, I’ll never truly know how the Germans got hold of some of his data in the thirties, but I’ve always wondered if he just— That is, I know he communicated with people elsewhere in the world, trading ideas and theories and very technical letters I used to read over his shoulder without understanding any of it at all…”

He trailed off, lost in memories, but it was just as well, because I needed a moment to start breathing again. “The Germans—the Germans got hold of his werewolf research?” We’d done the war in History of Magic, a couple times, actually. One of the things Professor Oswald used to talk about to get our attention was how the Axis Powers had werewolf brigades: ones who were fully transformed all the time, not just when the moon was full. The terror of the Allied armies, he’d called them, they’d decimated our forces. “That was because of _him_?”

“No,” Thomas snapped. I’d never heard his voice sound that harsh before. “If they hadn’t had that, they would only have done something else. It was not his fault.”

“I know,” I said quickly, though I wasn’t totally sure I agreed. They definitely would’ve had something else, but it also probably wouldn’t have been nearly as destructive. And if he’d given them the research they needed… Whether or not he’d known what was going come from all that, people had died. A lot of them. Actions have consequences. Intention doesn’t matter much to a corpse, and the road to hell, etc. “I’m not blaming him,” I finished, which was by way of being a white lie—but it had been a very long time ago. And I had a feeling that horse was fairly well beat.

“People did,” he said, and I saw all the fight go out of him with those two words. “He did. So many people died; most of our friends died; I almost died. And I think he saw himself as architect of it all. Well. Humility was never a particular strength of his.” He closed his eyes, and when he spoke again, his voice was totally flat, as if he were trying to pretend it had all happened to someone else. “And then he got home and blew his brains out with his service revolver.”

Now, I know I’m not a good person, because my first thought wasn’t, _God, that must’ve been awful for you_ , or even, _That poor bastard_ , but instead, _Oh, hey, I didn’t know the wizards serving in the war had guns as well, I wonder how integrated they were with the Muggles, they never tell you about things like that._  Luckily, I did not say that or anything else similar, because I think if I had, he would’ve been well within his rights to never speak to me again. But it left me without anything to say, and I’ve never been good at sympathy or the right words at the right times, so I just grabbed his hand and held it tightly until he closed his fingers around mine and squeezed back.

“Okay,” I said. “I get it. I still don’t agree with you, but I get it.”

He squeezed my hand again and made as if to let go, but I kept holding on, and he didn’t pull away, just relaxed into it after a moment of hesitation. “He,” he said, but then he didn’t finish.

“People did terrible things with what’s in the Chamber,” I said for him, “and it killed him, and you can’t stand the thought of it happening again, after all that.”

“Yes,” he whispered.

“Yeah,” I said. “I get that. And you were right, I didn’t before. And I’m sorrier than ever about the things I said to you. But you’re still wrong about destroying his work.” He started to shake his head, and I kept going before he could open his mouth. “No, Thomas, listen to me. Please. Hear me out. I won’t yell, and you won’t interrupt, and we’ll have this conversation like the reasonable adults we are, okay? Please.”

It took him a moment, but he nodded. “All right. I’m listening.”

Which was a lot of pressure to say exactly the right words, but I marshalled my thoughts and did my best. “What the Germans did with his work,” I said, “might be why he died. But the work itself, his dreams, his research—isn’t that why he lived? And don’t you lose all that if you reduce it to his death? It can’t only be about the last, worst moments of his life. That’s not fair to him. He must’ve decided that it was only good for the terrible things it was used for, but he was wrong, all right, Thomas? He was wrong. There is so much that could still come out of everything he did. Don’t take that away from him.”

He wanted to believe me, I could see it, but I could also see something was holding him back, and I waited for it. “Even if we could keep it from the Faceless Man,” he said quietly, “I’m afraid I don’t particularly want the Department of Mysteries to have it either.”

“Neither do I,” I said quickly, “considering he switched jobs to keep it from them, and especially considering they locked you up like a lab rat for a while, which believe me, I am incredibly unhappy about.”

“Peter, that is a gross exaggeration of the situation.”

I wasn’t so sure, but I decided it was a conversation for a different time. “But what I’m saying is that there are more than two groups of people in the world.”

“There are,” he agreed. “But my authority over what happens to everything there exists only so long as I am the only person capable of accessing it. He didn’t leave a will, so at the time, everything went to his family. At this point, I suppose it still might—in which case I imagine they’d have fewer qualms about the Ministry—or, after so long, it might simply belong to the government regardless.”

“ _Why_  wouldn’t he leave a will,” I griped. “It’s not like he didn’t know—” And then I stopped, because that was hitting a fairly high level of insensitivity.

“That he was going to die?” he finished for me anyway. “I think… He couldn’t leave everything to me, because—well, because people would have talked. And I imagine he didn’t want to leave it to his family, as they were not on good terms by then, so leaving it to no one was the best he could think of. It’s possible he would’ve thought of some other solution if he’d been thinking more clearly, but then, if he’d been thinking more clearly, he might not have—died.”

“And because he didn’t bother with a will, his family got everything anyway.”

He nodded jerkily. “Though they’d already practically disowned him for—for other things, and then the scandal in the war and the way he died didn’t help, so I don’t believe they ultimately kept any of it. Trying to distance themselves.”

“Bastards,” I said.

To my surprise, he smiled a little. “Yes, they were, rather. Though I might be more inclined to object to that particular choice of theirs if I didn’t know he would’ve much rather they not have any of it anyway. I believe in the end they made a gift of his estate to Hogwarts and washed their hands of it.”

A thought poked at me, and I froze, trying to let it come through. “Thomas,” I said slowly, as it formed in my brain, “is that the way they worded it? That they were making a gift of his estate?”

He frowned. “I suppose, though I wasn’t paying a great deal of attention at the time. Why?”

“Because that’s pretty vague, and I’m almost certain any decent lawyer could argue that it would include any of his research materials.” He went completely still, and I grinned at him wildly, becoming surer by the second. “And that’s if Hogwarts doesn’t own it already. I mean, he was doing it here, right? Was Hogwarts funding him? Hang on, does Hogwarts fund academic research? Do I get something for that? Fuck, I should’ve read my employment contract, uh, at all, pretty much.”

“ _Peter_ ,” he said, and he looked like I’d just handed him the universe on a platter. “You don’t really think—” But I could see the crazy hope rising in his eyes, and I knew _he_ really thought, and then we were grinning at each other like kids.

“Did they ask you about it when he died?” I said. “You said people knew about his research, so if they thought they had a claim, they would’ve asked, right? Or—maybe they didn’t think you knew, or—”

“Everyone asked,” he told me. “Hogwarts, the Ministry, friends. The only people who didn’t ask were his family members, but that may have only been because they weren’t speaking to me. That entire period is somewhat garbled in my memory, but as far as I can recall, I told everyone the same thing: I had no idea where he’d kept his lab, I had no idea how he accessed it, and they could all go hang. I don’t believe I cared who legally owned it; I never wanted to see any of it again, and I didn’t particularly want anyone else to either.”

Which was understandable, considering the timing. “I think if Hogwarts wanted to make even the tiniest effort, they could convince a judge that David Mellenby’s work is legally theirs,” I said. “Think we could sell Seawoll on that? It is his school.”

“Yes,” he said instantly, which surprised me, because last I checked, they didn’t like each other much. “I’m fairly certain I could.”

“And he’d keep it out of the Department of Mysteries and with people like Abdul, or, or—or really anyone who’d want to use it for the right things?”

“Yes,” he said, and he smiled at me wonderfully, and I thought to myself, _The instant we’re not talking about his dead probably-ex-boyfriend, I’m doing the grab and kiss thing_. “Yes, I think he would.”

#

“The entrance to the Chamber of Secrets is in a _girls’ toilet?_ ”

Thomas raised an eyebrow at me. “You were expecting something more glamorous?”

“Actually? Yes!” I gestured around us, from the cracked and pitted mirrors to the dirty sinks to the toilet stalls themselves, which were behind chipped doors painted with faded and cracking paint. Half of them had signs reading ‘out of order.’ “I’ve read about Salazar Slytherin, and I’m pretty sure I’ve got a feeling for the amount of personal drama it would take to actually go about creating a secret room with a giant deadly snake inside of it that can only be accessed by your direct descendants, and somehow, this is not matching up for me.”

“Hmm,” he said. “Yes, well. He was a Slytherin, after all. The prototype, in fact.”

I hated it when he got obtuse. “Meaning?”

“Subtlety, Peter,” he said. “There’s a reason I believe I’m the only person alive who knows where it is, and I imagine its lack of drama contributes.”

“Yeah, come to that,” I said, “how’d Mellenby ever find it?”

“I believe a snake told him,” he said, bending over to look at the sinks more closely. “Or something of that sort, at any rate.”

I crossed my arms. “Sure, but there’ve been Parselmouths at Hogwarts besides Mellenby. It’s rare, but not one in centuries rare. Hell, the Mellenby family is still around, aren’t they, passing on the gene? So how is it no one at all, for centuries, has ever found the thing, but he did?”

“That’s a fair point; I’ve no idea.” He glanced over, and I must’ve been making a fairly tragic expression, because he smiled slightly, looking amused. “Secretive to the extreme, Peter, when he wasn’t sharing ideas. He never told me in detail. The only reason I know how to access it at all is because I thought if he injured himself during an experiment, someone ought to know where to look. He got sick of me worrying, so he showed me.”

“Just because he got sick of you worrying? Healthy sense of self-preservation, he had.”

“Yes, that doesn’t seem to be a quality I require, despite my best efforts to induce it in people,” he said absently, peering at a different sink, and then he twitched, and his eyes darted towards me, looking wary and embarrassed.

I grinned at him, delighted. I actually think I’ve got a very healthy respect for the need to save my own skin, but I could see how he might’ve gotten the other impression, considering we were running around trying to catch a Dark wizard I definitely couldn’t fight. “Lucky me,” I told him cheerfully, testing the waters.

Confused got added onto wary and embarrassed. “I—yes,” he said, and then he cleared his throat abruptly. “Ah, I think I’ve found it.”

I blinked, distracted. “The entrance to the Chamber of Secrets is a sink?”

“Would you prefer it be a toilet?”

“I was thinking a mirror.”

He didn’t quite roll his eyes at me, but I got the feeling it was a near thing. “I’ll be sure to take your feedback under consideration, Peter. May we get on?”

I agreed we could, especially since I’d been the one to say that if the Faceless Man knew about the Chamber of Secrets, we should probably move all of Mellenby’s research out of there before he finished with his snake throats. “But how? You don’t speak Parseltongue. Do you?”

“I don’t,” he said, “not naturally. But David helped me be able to reliably replicate a phrase or two, and that’s enough to get you through the door, as it were.” He looked again at the sink, cleared his throat, and made a horrible guttural hissing sound, like he was grating air across his throat. At the end, he coughed. “It’s very hard to get the pronunciation right with a human voice box.”

I didn’t respond, though, because my attention was entirely taken up by the sinks and drains moving aside to reveal a long, dark hole in the ground—a pipe, I thought, except one that clearly wasn’t being used for plumbing, because the sides were dry as a bone as far down as I could see. I had about seven questions, but I looked at Thomas and started with, “What did that mean? And if you say he didn’t tell you, I’m going to find a way to go back in time and shake him.”

He pinked slightly, and I couldn’t help admiring the way it looked on him. “Ah, that won’t be necessary. It was the first thing he taught me, and it means ‘David, you’re a genius.’ As I said, humility was not a great strength of his.”

I couldn’t help the laugh. “I guess if I got to pick and choose what parts of my secret language I got to teach someone, I’d start with the base flattery too.” I leaned over the pipe, which I couldn’t help noticing went down far beyond my ability to see the bottom. I thought it might turn, though, and mentally upgraded it to a tube slide, of the likes my seven-year-old self would’ve been delighted to discover. My twenty-five-year-old self, was, despite all appearances, a little more sensible. I looked back at Thomas. “How do you get back up? Because I didn’t bring my broomstick.” And I wasn’t entirely sure I was a slick enough flyer to get it up something that narrow anyway, but I didn’t say that part out loud to the apparently ex-star Hufflepuff Chaser, because I wasn’t sure it would impress.

“I brought mine,” he said. “You can use that, if you like.”

Oh, good. “And you’ll…?”

“Turn into a bird.”

Right.

We didn’t fly down, though, because Thomas just shrugged and jumped into the pipe like that was a normal thing to do, and I wasn’t about to be outdone. It was a sufficiently harrowing experience that my respect for David Mellenby’s secrecy shot up a few miles, and I rather thought Thomas might’ve been wrong about how the Germans got past it. No one who is willing to do that on a regular basis in a bid for privacy is going to give it all up just because you asked.

I shot out at the bottom and would’ve quickly and painfully met the hard stone ground if Thomas hadn’t caught me with a neat spell that lifted me into the air and then set me gently on my feet, light as a feather settling down. It would’ve been a perfect landing if I hadn’t stumbled on the dismount, catching my left foot on what were, upon closer inspection, quite a lot of small bones.

“Because that’s not ominous at all,” I muttered, kicking them away and finding my balance.

Thomas frowned at them. “I used to clean them up, but I suppose it has been a rather long time.”

“Since 1945? I’ll say.” I took another look at his always immaculate suit, tie, cuff links, and handmade shoes. “You used to _clean_?”

“Well, it’s not as though David was ever going to do it,” he said, but he sounded fond, and I could tell he hadn’t minded. And then he cast a spell that created a weird haze in the air, like heat waves coming off of asphalt or a mirage in a film. “In case the basilisk is awake,” he said. “But do close your eyes if you spot any sudden movement. If we both get petrified, it’s not as though not being dead immediately will do us much good.”

And on that encouraging note, we set off.

If he’d cleaned in the 1940s, there wasn’t much evidence of it anymore, considering the Chamber had had all the intervening years to accumulate a layer of grime, dust, and bones. The tunnel we picked our way through, quietly, and a with reasonable level of paranoia about signs of other living beings down here with us, was dank, filthy, and _cold_ , which Thomas said, when I asked, was deliberate.

“Basilisks are cold-blooded,” he said. “I believe the temperature is meant to keep it slow and more likely to sleep the years away until an Heir of Slytherin comes to tell it who to kill. With any luck, it’s asleep right now, and we won’t see it at all.”

He had to use Parseltongue once more, on a last door, and this time he smiled at me before I even had time to ask. “That one means ‘come have something to eat before you blow yourself up.’ I asked.” His smile widened and turned teasing. “It’s a pity you don’t speak Parseltongue yourself, or I imagine I’d still be getting plenty of use out of it.”

God, I loved it when he smiled. “What,” I said, “English isn’t good enough for you anymore?”

“I just worry it’s not enough to get your attention when you’re absorbed. Very little seems to be able to stand up to the ability to make things explode.”

“Believe it or not, most of the things I make aren’t supposed to explode at all.” I got a patient look for that, which I probably deserved, given what I’d spent most of the term working on. “And you don’t need any help getting my attention.”

That was some fairly blatant flirting, so it was good that he didn’t look confused this time, just shocked for an instant, open, the way I usually didn’t see him. It was gone the next moment, though, his face going true repressed-Englishman-blank as he turned back to the door and started walking quickly. “The main room of the Chamber is just through here.”

Okay, so he wasn’t interested. Only—I could’ve sworn that in the instant when I’d surprised him, I’d seen something else too, a quick glimpse of something like happiness and sharp, pointed attraction. Okay, so he _was_ interested. Maybe.

“Fuck it,” I said, and walked quickly after him. Fuck it, because waiting and wondering and wallowing and thinking maybe had lost its charm sometime around the moment I’d seen him look at me in the Room of Requirement. I took brief notice of the room—huge, stone, bloody great statue of Salazar Slytherin at one end, the egotistical plonker, tables and papers and instruments I was definitely going to be fascinated with in about ten minutes at the other.

But I didn’t think too hard about that, because it turned out I did have priorities after all, and right now they were basically all focused on the unbearable fucking mixed signals I’d been getting all day. I almost stopped when I thought I heard a noise behind me, but when I looked—stupidly, considering it might’ve been a giant snake that killed you with a glance—there was nothing, and I decided I must’ve just disturbed some bones on my way in, and they were finishing settling. I ignored it, which would prove to be a very stupid mistake later, and grabbed Thomas’s arm, stopping him in his determined track across the room to what must be David Mellenby’s old lab, undisturbed after all these years.

“Wait,” I said, and he looked at me. I tried to read him, and I thought—maybe wary, maybe eager, but mostly he was just closed off, and I couldn’t tell. I took another step closer and saw his nostrils flare as he inhaled sharply. “Wait, Thomas.”

Except then I couldn’t think of anything to say, so I just went on looking at him, and he went on looking at me, and I thought belatedly, _Time and place, Peter_ , but I’d already started, hadn’t I, and I had to know, because I always had to know. And Lesley was right about everything anyway, which meant it stood to reason she was right about this too, so I threw talking as a resolution tactic out the window and carefully, telegraphing my actions as much as I could so he could pull away if he wanted, raised the hand not already holding his arm. I brushed my fingers against his cheekbone and then flattened my palm out to rest against the side of his face, cupping it, and then he still hadn’t moved or said anything or possibly breathed, so I kissed him.

Just barely, because I hadn’t asked and he hadn’t said. Just a soft press of our lips together, except it felt like a hell of a lot more, because my heart was pounding right through my fingers and toes, and for all I knew, he could feel the thumping wherever I was touching him. I pulled back a few centimeters, just far enough to see him without going cross-eyed, and met his wide-open startled eyes.

“ _Peter_ ,” he said softly. I always liked the way he said my name, but it was better like this, low and a little hoarse, just from that tiny bit of contact. Which was promising. I waited—for him to say something else, yes, no, for him to push me away or pull me closer.

But he didn’t, so eventually I just leaned forward again, even slower than before, and pressed our lips together again. I lingered this time, and after another moment of stillness—and really, I thought, how much of a surprise could it possibly have been—he made a soft sound into my mouth, like a sigh or a moan, and his hand came up around to rest on the back of my neck, where he held on tight, and then he tilted his head just slightly, and his mouth moved, _finally_ , and we were kissing properly. His lips were soft and careful against mine, a little hesitant, and I pushed closer, curling my fingers into the soft hair at the side of his face and letting go of his arm to get my other arm around his back, pressing against the knobs of his spine.

“Peter,” he repeated, when we separated, except then he must’ve changed his mind about talking, because he fisted the hand not on my neck in my shirt and reeled me in again, and I forgot all about what he was going to say in favor of giving my best show at the task at hand.

I nipped at his lower lip and got a gasp and an actual shudder, one I could feel in his spine, for my trouble. I sucked on it a moment for good measure and then took advantage of the fact that he’d opened his mouth to press even closer and introduce myself to his tongue.

By the time he finally turned his head away from me, looking to the side, we were sharing the same square foot of space, practically standing on each other’s toes. I kissed his cheekbone once because I couldn’t help myself, and he shivered again, and then I leaned forward and rested my forehead against the side of his head. We were both panting hard, the sound of it echoing in the massive stone chamber we were still, incongruously, standing in. _Time and place, Peter_ , I thought again, and I slowly became aware that I was grinning like a loon.

“Peter,” he said. His voice was rough, and he very much sounded like he’d spent the last few minutes being thoroughly kissed. He had to clear his throat. “We, ah—we probably shouldn’t have done that.”

It was like stepping directly into a cold shower and expecting it to be warm. I didn’t move, though, just kept holding him, one arm around him and the other resting on his shoulder, where it had dropped to when he’d moved his head. After very enthusiastically kissing me, so whatever reason he had for thinking this was a bad idea, it wasn’t that he wasn’t interested.

“Is this the part where you tell me you’re secretly married?” I said.

“What?” He did pull away then, but I caught his hand as he did and held it tightly. He let me. “No!”

“In a romantic relationship of any sort?” I persisted.

“No, that’s not—”

“Any more massive secrets about your past you haven’t mentioned? You’re actually a fifteenth century medieval monk, for instance, or possibly an alien traveling around time and space in a police box?”

“Peter.”

I rubbed my thumb over the back of his hand. “Just checking. And Hogwarts doesn’t have any weird inter-office relationship policies, because I’m fairly certain we haven’t even got an HR department—which is probably a bad thing, come to think—so it’s definitely not that.”

That got me a smile. “The Ministry didn’t have a human resources department until after I’d stopped working there, so I wouldn’t hold your breath.”

“You retired in the _seventies_ ,” I said, momentarily sidetracked. “The Ministry of bloody Magic didn’t have an HR department until the 1970s? Fuck me, the wizarding world is a disaster.”

His smile widened. His lips were shiny and spit-slick, and the grin was broad enough that I could see his crooked teeth. Braces: not a thing in the early twentieth century, as it turned out. I smiled back helplessly, still holding his hand.

“I would really, really like to kiss you again,” I told him honestly. “Remind me why I’m not supposed to?”

His expression shuttered. “I don’t think it’s a very good idea,” he said flatly.

Which wasn’t an answer, but it was a fairly clear ‘no.’ I let go of his hand and felt oddly bereft when it slipped away, the callouses catching briefly against my palm. His mouth tightened, and he put it in his pocket, as if to discourage me from grabbing hold again.

I might’ve pressed the point anyway, because he’d kissed me back, pulled me closer, and held me to him, but then there was a grinding sound, and we both whipped around to see the mouth of Slytherin’s statue opening slowly.

“Tell me that’s supposed to happen,” I said.

“That depends. Did you want to meet a several-centuries-old basilisk? We must have woken it somehow. Possibly just by coming here.”

“ _Fuck_.” I grabbed my wand from my jeans’ pocket and held it out in front of me, where I’d like to report that it didn’t tremble at all. Which is a bloody miracle, because I was terrified. “How do we kill it? Or are we not supposed to? Are they endangered species? Or is it sentient? If you can talk to snakes and they can talk back, does that mean they’re sentient?”

“I’d rather we didn’t kill it, honestly,” he said, ignoring the rest of what I’d said. I chanced a look at him. His stance was better than mine: more relaxed. I tried to imitate him. He was looking at me, too, and I realized that _of course_ he was, because it would be fucking stupid to look directly at the statue the way I had been. “Though I suppose I will if I have to.”

“Right. Okay. How do we subdue it?”

“You don’t do anything.” He correctly interpreted the look on my face at that and continued, urgently, “No, Peter, listen to me. You have no experience, and this beast would be far out of many talented Aurors’ weight class. I can handle this on my own.”

“Thomas—”

“I can.” He put his hand on my shoulder and leaned forward, staring intently into my eyes. “Apart from anything else, we have never worked together in a combat situation, and we will be without the benefit of sight. This will not be easier if we’re constantly stumbling into or attacking each other because we can’t coordinate our movements.” He must’ve seen me hesitate, because he went on, faster and more desperately than before. “Please. I would much rather you stayed safe. Honestly, I hope it might recognize me, but if it doesn’t, I will be much more capable of doing this if I’m sure you’re all right.”

“Mixed signals,” I muttered, but I couldn’t actually argue with what he’d said, and I’d started being able to hear the slithering and hissing as the basilisk neared, so we were rapidly running out of time. “Fine. But if we both get out of this alive, you are teaching me to fight people better right along with Abigail Kamara, and I am never letting you out of my sight again.”

“Whatever you like,” he agreed quickly, which sort of made me think I should’ve held out instead for an explanation about the whole ‘yes, kiss me, no, stop’ thing. “Now go back to the entrance to the Chamber. I’ll meet you there when I’m done.”

I nodded and ran for it, making it halfway across that huge room towards the stone corridor before it occurred to me that if I’d gone in for a romantic, what-if-we-die kiss, I’d probably have gotten away with it. Shows me for thinking with my brain in times of crisis.

Behind me, I heard a splash as the basilisk slid out of the statue and hit the watery area around it, a sort of pond sourced by leakage from the pipes, and then Thomas saying something in Parseltongue. Considering most of his vocabulary seemed to be things he or David Mellenby had found amusing, I didn’t hold out a lot of hope for that option. I gritted my teeth and made myself keep going anyway.

I reached the tunnel and in my peripheral vision, fifteen feet in front of me, I saw the ribcage of a small animal abruptly shoot a foot to the side—as if a force had impacted it. Still moving, I had an entire train of thought in about half a second: _that wasn’t me, it was probably the wind, there isn’t any wind this far underground, ohfuck._ And then I kept running. I kept my eyes fixed on the hall ahead of me, and when I passed that area, I crossed my mental fingers and jabbed my elbow sharply to the side.

I heard an _oof_ of exhaled breath as my arm impacted, and then everything happened at once. I still had my wand in my hand from my near encounter with the basilisk, which saved my life. Even then, I barely got it up in time to shout, “ _Protego_!” and jump backwards, towards the Chamber. A red bolt of light exploded against my shield less than half a second later, and I jumped back another couple of paces and marshalled my thoughts for nonverbal spellcasting—never my specialty.

In front of me, the figure rallied, but I thought I had a second. Disillusionment charms are all well and good, but the fact is that once you know they’re there, you can usually see the outline of whoever it is moving around, and besides, it’s hard to maintain them and do basically any other magic. Which is why they’re not much use as a dueling technique. Whoever this was—my money was on Awa Shambir, though she was shorter than I remembered—was going to have to drop it if she wanted to fight me properly.

I decided not to give her the chance.

Pointing my wand directly upwards at the ceiling of the tunnel, I spared a brief prayer to any all-powerful entities who might be listening, godly or not (I’ve been hedging my bets ever since I found out about magic), that Slytherin really was as good with construction spells and we were as far from the actual foundations of Hogwarts as I’d thought. Then I cast the strongest _Reducto_ I could muster, turned my back, and ran for it.

I just barely made it back into the room—the room with the basilisk, this not being my greatest plan ever—before the ceiling collapsed directly where I’d been standing. I did glance briefly upwards, but the rest of the architecture didn’t even fracture. Score one for Salazar Slytherin’s spellcasting.

“Peter?” Thomas shouted.

“You worry about your thing; I’ll worry about mine!” I yelled back, ignoring him and very definitely not glancing over to see how he was doing. I didn’t think a little thing like rubble was likely to stop any employee of the Faceless Man for very long, but that was okay—I had a clever plan.

I’d had just enough time to race across the room and get my wand ready when the rubble shot outwards like it’d been hit with a wrecking ball. A figure walked through the new space there, and I gaped stupidly in surprise when the dust cleared. “ _Varvara?_ ” Upon saying which a couple things abruptly became clear, like, “Oh, fuck, that’s how the Faceless Man knew Mellenby was a Parselmouth—you heard Thomas say so in the bloody staff room. How the hell did we not remember that?”

“No idea,” she said, friendly enough. “I rather thought you would, and I planned to make myself scarce all day, if I’m honest. Hello, Peter.” And then she raised her wand and pointed it directly at my chest. Not so friendly, then.

“Wait,” I shouted. “Look where I’m standing!”

She did pause to take me in, and I could see her face when she got it. “That’s Mellenby’s blasted research, isn’t it.”

I grinned from my place behind one of Mellenby’s huge tables of samples and equipment and beautiful, heaping piles of notes. “Right. So before you cast any area of effect spells—”

“Before I what?”

Shit, that was Dungeons and Dragons instead of proper wizarding nomenclature. “Before you, uh, attack me at all, then, keep in mind that if you hit any of this stuff, I don’t think your boss is going to be all that happy with you.”

She looked momentarily annoyed, but then she just shrugged. “I’ll just have to hit just you, then, won’t I? And the Nightingale seems a bit busy—I don’t like your chances, Peter.”

I forewent the witty comeback in favor of pointing my wand directly at her smug face and yelling, “ _Expelliarmus_!”

She batted the spell away almost lazily, and the Stunner I sent right on its heels practically with the same motion. The red bolt of light she sent my direction—silently cast—impacted against the Shield Charm I hastily threw up and dissipated it, which was a very bad comparison of our respective skill levels. I decided the smartest course of action was just to keep her occupied until Thomas got finished with the basilisk and had time to play knight in shining armor, though I have to admit, it did rankle against my manly pride a bit.

And then, with an almost casual flick of her wrist, she sent a bolt of green light shooting straight at my chest.

I just barely managed to hit the ground in time, dropping hard enough that my knees throbbed, and I had a feeling one of them was bleeding. Shield Charms aren’t any good against the Unforgivables, and she was quicker on the draw than I was. I was breathing heavily, stupidly shocked. She’d tried to _kill_ me. Yesterday, we’d sat together in the staff room complaining about students asking for extra credit assignments, and today she’d tried to _kill_ me.

“Shit!” I yelled, and then, with some seriously phenomenal timing, the skinny grenade I’d thrown to the ground as I’d raced across the Chamber towards Mellenby’s lab exploded with a crack that made my ears ring and a flaming inferno that would make any dragon proud. When I’d dropped it, I’d had no way of knowing where she would be when it released, but I was hoping desperately that the answer was ‘close enough.’

I heard her cursing loudly, which was promising, but she sounded more annoyed than pained. I patted my pockets quickly, but I’m not actually in the habit of carrying around large amounts of highly dangerous potions on my person when I’m wandering around a school full of children. I had one more, but that was it—I’d only been carrying those two around, stuffed in my jeans, because I’d been in the kind of mood where playing with bombs had sounded like a very appealing use of my afternoon, before Lesley’s tip had changed my plans so comprehensively.

I had a bad feeling one more skinny grenade was not going to stop Varvara Sidorovna Tamonina. I had cover for now, but she was going to find a way around that sooner or later.

As if to prove me right, the ground beneath me, dry this far from the basilisk’s home and the pipes, began to ice over. I swear the temperature of the stone dropped twenty degrees in a second, and when I hissed and yanked my hands off the floor, I left a couple pieces of skin behind me, sticking to the ice. If this kept up, in a couple of seconds, my legs and feet, still in contact with it so I could stay low and behind the table, would be frozen solid. An iceberg shaped like me was not going to be able to stop her from marching up and taking whatever she wanted from this place.

No one needs to cast the Killing Curse to make you very dead. It just helps.

Waiting around wasn’t an option, then, and neither was staying here. Already, my feet were starting to ache, bone deep, and I had a bit of an idea that was a bad thing. I was balanced on my toes and knees, still on the ground, and they were burning with the bitter cold, so painful I could barely think. I was shivering all over, my breath showed in the air, and I would be toast in seconds. About all I had left were extremely stupid ideas and blind hope. “Next time,” I said, probably loud enough for her to hear, “I am not going into the lair with the MacGuffin with anything less than a full tactical team of Hit Wizards. And another just for the dangerous magical creature I already know is there. Fuck, we’re stupid.” Which wasn’t totally true, because not bringing people down here had been half the point, but that was not going to be a great comfort to me when this killed me.

I flung my hand up long enough to grab something I’d seen on top of the table when I’d gotten over here, and then I yanked myself off the icy ground, stayed low, and ran for it, rolling out from behind the table, throwing up another shield and ducking for good measure as I did. I came up to a standing position at the back of the room, across from the statue of Slytherin. Keeping my gaze unfocused and towards the wall, I yelled, as loudly as I could, “Thomas! Eyes on me!”

Varvara didn’t so much as glance behind her; she knew he was too busy with the snake to get over here to deal with her, which meant she noticed when I lifted the other skinny grenade like I was going to throw it at her. Primed from the other one, her eyes tracked it, raising her wand to counter.

So I knew exactly where she was looking when I cast _Engorgio_ on the mirror I’d picked up off of David Mellenby’s work table. (I guess even Parselmouths aren’t stupid enough not to take some precautions when spending quality time with a basilisk.) I didn’t know where the _snake_ would be looking, but I had to trust that Thomas knew what I wanted, because it was that or lie down and let her kill me.

The mirror went huge and full-sized in an instant, and I dropped the skinny grenade—lightly enough I didn’t think the interior glass would crack—and braced the back with the hand she’d been watching. I thought I heard a gasp, but it might’ve been wishful thinking, or it might’ve been the sound of the fight still going on across the chamber.

 _Please_ , I thought, _let her have still been looking at the mirror_.

 _Please_ , I thought, _let the basilisk’s eyes have been somewhere in the background of this massively heavy reflective surface._

I waited, holding my breath and gripping my wand with my very sweaty palm, but nothing happened. And nothing went on happening, and I went on standing behind that mirror and holding my wand, just in case she was waiting for me to peek my head around the side, until the bangs and crashes from across the room stopped and I heard Thomas shouting my name.


	4. Chapter 4

I ducked around the side of the mirror, since I figured that if Varvara were still there, I’d hear them fighting instead. Instead, she stood, statue-like fifteen feet away, a look of annoyed surprise on her still face.

“Fuck me,” I said, staring at her outstretched wand and glassy eyes. “I did not expect that to work.”

Thomas didn’t even spare a glance at her, just raced up to me and made an aborted motion with both hands, like he wanted to grab my shoulders or, possibly, hug me. I saw his eyes dart up and down, looking me over, and he said, “Peter. You’re all right?”

“I’m fine,” I said, though in actual point of fact, my knees and feet hurt like hell. “In fact, I’m a genius, and so are you.” Considering that he’d been right before, and we had no reason to know each other’s cues in a fight, I was willing to chalk that one up to our amazing brainpower. That or natural chemistry. “The basilisk?”

“Taken care of.” He finally looked over his shoulder at Varvara, and when he faced me again, I thought he looked impressed. “Well done, but what on earth did you do?”

I stared at him. I’d happily admit to being pretty damn proud, but— “You don’t know?”

“I was all the way across the room; I’ve absolutely no idea.” He looked over Varvara again. “I’ve seen hexes that freeze a person in place, but this is—ah. The basilisk? But she’s facing the wrong way, isn’t she?”

“You helped,” I said. “You didn’t even know what you were doing?”

He frowned. “I helped? Oh— ‘eyes on me’? I’m afraid I guessed. I knew I likely only had a moment or two to try to work what it was you wanted, but as I couldn’t think of any possible reason my looking at you would help, I thought perhaps… After all,” he added dryly, “if I’d been wrong, the only possible consequences would’ve been to find you petrified or dead, with whoever it was you were fighting making off with David’s research.”

“Yeah, only that,” I said, and somehow the image was enough to make me laugh wildly. I might’ve been a bit giddy with success and wasted adrenaline, but suddenly close calls and my possible death were hilarious. “In that case, we make a fantastic team. And thanks for trusting that I knew what I was doing, considering.”

He smiled. “It’s terribly easy to trust you, Peter.” Luckily, he turned away from me before I had to come up with a response to that and went on, “You used the basilisk to petrify her. How?”

“Oh, uh—I made sure she was looking at me, got you to make sure the basilisk was looking at me, and then I enlarged a mirror I’d grabbed and put it right in between me and her. So she ended up looking at the mirror, and the basilisk ended up looking at the mirror, and she saw its reflection. Instant petrified evil minion.”

He looked at me, and this time I _knew_ he looked impressed. I tried to look modest, which was not how I was feeling. “Peter, that is perfectly ingenious. An inspired use of resources and not one I would have thought of. I’m just glad I interpreted your instructions correctly.”

I laughed again. I couldn’t help it. “Me too. She was kicking my arse. I probably would’ve been dead in about a minute otherwise.”

He twitched, a sharp movement that wasn’t quite a flinch. “In that case, I am very, very glad.”

We both looked back over at the new statue of our ex-coworker, and I felt the adrenaline high start to seep away as the practicalities slunk back in. I thought Varvara being petrified was going to be a bit inconvenient for the interrogation Seawoll was definitely going to want to conduct, because while I can definitely brew the countering potion, I don’t exactly have fresh, mature Mandrakes lying around in my supplies, but Thomas just got a funny look on his face when I mentioned it and asked if the potion went bad ever. When I told him it didn’t, he went to Mellenby’s lab tables (where the ice had melted completely, I noticed) and opened a drawer with unerring accuracy, pulling out a vial. He came straight back to me, and from the way he kept his eyes up, I thought he was trying not to look at anything else there.

“David might have been fairly in control, but accidents happen,” he said, handing it to me. “At least this way you don’t have to make any fresh.”

I looked down at the vial in my hand—dust-free, Mellenby must have gone wild with the sterilization spells if they’d lasted all this time—and back up at Thomas. “Be honest. How many times did you get petrified?”

He didn’t quite laugh, but judging by the grin that broke out on his face, it was close. “Just the once. But I think it made an impression.”

#

After a truly harrowing experience getting three people, two mobile and one not, back up Salazar Slytherin’s bathroom tube slide (with one broom)—which sounds like that shitty riddle about the boat, the wolf, the goat, and the cabbage—we finally managed to get to Seawoll’s office with minimal tears and student sightings. (Thomas put Varvara back under a Disillusionment, which was great for our stealth but also meant that we accidentally lost her twice along the way, because moving an invisible body around is not easy.) It would’ve gone faster, but after the adrenaline wore off, I’d started to notice the deep, painful ache in my feet and shins. I didn’t mention it, but it hurt to walk, and I was dying to sit down.

Thomas went up to Seawoll’s office alone, leaving me leaning shiftily against the wall, putting all my weight first on one foot and then the other, trying to find a comfortable way to stand. I had my shoulder against Varvara’s back to keep her steady and upright and definitely where I thought she was. We had her posed with her side against the side of the corridor so her arm and wand would point down that way, instead of directly out into the open air where someone might walk into it and get accidentally clotheslined.

It wasn’t quite curfew yet, so I did get a couple of curious looks from students in the halls but no questions until Abigail Kamara stopped in front of me and crossed her arms over her chest, fixing me with a stern glare my mother would’ve been proud of. I resisted the urge to say that yes, I’d washed the dishes and made my bed, so could I go out to play now, please.

I let her heckle me for a while. I’d like to report that I gave as good as I got, but unfortunately, the best I can say is that I didn’t actually reveal any investigation details to an eleven-year-old. Which was harder than you might imagine. When Thomas came back down the stairs to bail me out before I fell apart completely, I was almost more grateful for that save than the thing with Varvara and the basilisk.

Together, we hauled Varvara—still petrified, still semi-invisible, still really inconveniently posed—onto the escalator (which is what it is, all right, magic being involved does not grant it its own name) and rode it to the top, where Seawoll was waiting for us with a scowl.

“Grant,” he said to me, just about the minute my head cleared the landing. “What the hell are you doing involved in this shit? I could’ve sworn I hired you to teach Potions.”

“Showing initiative?” I offered, but I didn’t think he was amused.

“Thomas,” he growled, as we finished rising and the staircase ground to a halt. “What the hell are _you_ doing involving him in this shit?”

“He involved himself,” Thomas said. “I judged that he was safer with me than without.”

“Which you failed to inform me of.”

“I didn’t think you’d agree.”

“Damn right I wouldn’t have. He’s barely qualified for the Potions position; he’s sure as hell not qualified for anything else.”

“On the contrary,” Thomas said, still in a polite, mild voice that I didn’t buy at all, “he performed admirably to the last. I couldn’t have done this without him.”

“Maybe that says more about you than it does about him.” Their eyes met and held for a charged second, and I knew there was something going on I wasn’t getting—some part of the story Thomas had left out or something I hadn’t known to ask for. Thomas looked away first, and Seawoll snorted. “You’ve got Tamonina?”

Thomas wordlessly tapped her on the head with his wand, cancelling the Disillusionment, and Seawoll raised his eyebrows.

“What the fuck is wrong with her? That’s not a standard Petrificus.”

“No, just a petrification,” I muttered, and Thomas smiled.

“It’s something of a long story, I’m afraid. Better to only tell it once.”

Seawoll’s lips pursed. “Fine. Get her in here.”

Waiting for Stephanopoulos to show up was its own special breed of awkward, born of listening to Thomas make polite conversation with Seawoll—who didn’t seem especially inclined to be polite back—while sitting on a comfortable red couch right next to Varvara’s deathly still form. Knowing she wasn’t actually dead, just evil and petrified thanks to the efforts of yours truly, did not help a whole lot. Eventually, I got up and took her wand away from her, which we’d been too distracted to do earlier. That didn’t help either; it just made her look deader.

It was a relief when Deputy Headmistress Miriam Stephanopoulos showed up to stare at each of us in turn, increasingly disbelieving and pissed off. “All right,” she said at last, sounding almost resigned, “what the fuck?”

Thomas told them, though I noticed he left out most of the gorier details of David Mellenby’s life, and after a moment, I didn’t offer them either. Maybe they were relevant, but I didn’t think so, and while Mellenby might be decades and a grave away from having to care about his dirty laundry, Thomas, staring fixedly at a point about five inches to the left of Seawoll’s face, wasn’t. I think Stephanopoulos could tell she was missing something, but every time she got a look on her face like she was going to ask, Seawoll gave her a _later_ look.

He knew, I realized, about Thomas’s age. But then, of course he did—Thomas’s identity as the Nightingale was probably why he’d been hired.

“ _I’m sorry_ ,” Seawoll said when Thomas was done, which I could tell meant bad things, because I’d never heard him apologize for anything before in my life. “There is a basilisk underneath my school?”

“I don’t quite think that’s the most important idea to take away from all that.”

“You’re right, Thomas.” I could see Seawoll’s jaw clench as he gritted his teeth. “The most important idea was: there’s a fucking basilisk underneath my fucking school, and _you didn’t kill it?_ ”

“We could relocate it,” I offered, and then wished I hadn’t, as Seawoll and Stephanopoulos gave me identical looks of disbelief at my idiocy.

“Grant,” Seawoll said, “where exactly is it you think we should put a fifty-foot goddamn snake that kills anything that looks at it? In a zoo?”

He had a point.

“It’s not an immediate threat, at any rate,” Thomas said. “Even if it were awake, it won’t go into the castle itself without a direct order from a wizard it recognizes as the Heir—Slytherin would hardly have stood for it killing just any students, after all. And if the Faceless Man had a natural Parselmouth on his books, he wouldn’t have needed to research ways of creating the talent.”

“Which you knew about how, again?” Stephanopoulos said, her eyes narrowed as she looked from one of us to the other.

Thomas didn’t even glance my direction. “I’m afraid that at this time, I can’t say.”

I tried not to either sigh in relief or look too pathetically grateful.

“Like hell,” Seawoll said. “But we’ll get back to that.” He jerked his thumb at Varvara’s still form. “Not that I don’t appreciate the gift-wrapping, but I’d like to question her.”

I held up the potion we’d taken from the lab, and he looked at me.

“What, you just had some lying around?”

“Nope,” I said cheerfully. “This is from the 1940s.”

“More likely the 1930s, in point of fact,” Thomas said, which had Stephanopoulos crossing her arms and frowning again. “But Peter assures me it will still work.”

“And not poison her?”

I nodded. “And for my second trick—” I held up the bottle of Veritaserum I’d insisted we stop by my office for. Giving it to people without their express, informed, and unforced consent is all kinds of illegal (funny, since the law thinks having the stuff is just fine), because while wizarding civil rights are all but nonexistent, we have gotten that far. But I thought he’d like the option anyway.

“Fine,” Seawoll said. “Though I don’t know about the other one—the last time we had people here working for him, they were all allergic to the damn stuff. They practically foamed at the goddamn mouth if we so much as had them smell it. Apparently, he can induce a fucking allergy now, and he’s practicing on truth drugs.” He looked disgusted. “I hate when criminals come up with new things.”

I fumbled the cap of Mellenby’s potion off and managed to carefully dribble it into Varvara’s mouth. Then I had to dip her back like a ballroom dancer so it would run into her throat—and then back up so it would go down. Such is the glamorous life of a potioneer. It would’ve been easier to inject it intravenously, which you can do sometimes, but the consistency was thick enough I would’ve worried about it killing her.

She came to slowly enough that I had time to get well away and for the others to close in on her with their wands out. I watched her realize where she was and how well and truly fucked she was, and then she got a rueful look on her face and raised her hands meekly. “Yes, all right,” she said. “I surrender.” She glanced at me. “Not bad, Peter.”

We got her into Seawoll’s least comfortable chair in no time and trussed up neatly, and then Seawoll sat across from her, his best and most threatening glare on his face. He held up the Veritaserum. “Want some?”

Varvara looked pointedly down at each of her arms—or at least the parts of them she could see, since her wrists were tied behind her back. “I don’t think I could sign the paperwork.”

Stephanopoulos raised her eyebrows. “But if you could?”

“That depends—how’s your protective custody? I don’t want to end up like murdered in custody like some of his last bunch of professors.” When she saw the looks on our faces, she laughed. “I don’t have any particular loyalty to my employer, if that’s what has you surprised. I’m a contractor, not one of his devotees. I might keep my mouth shut if I had any illusions that he took care of his workers with anything other than an assassination, but I haven’t been that naïve since before I was in school myself.”

“You’re not allergic?” I blurted out.

“Oh, that?” She made a dismissive expression. “He offered, but I’m not so stupid. Better to talk and live, don’t you think? No need to let him create another way to kill me.”

“Seems to me,” Stephanopoulos said, “that you think it’s in your best interests to talk, period. Why ask us about protective custody?”

“I’ll talk either way,” she agreed. “I’ll only take the Veritaserum if you can assure me that I won’t be dead in a cell before the week’s out.”

Which meant, in essence, that she was holding hostage the right to lie or keep things back, with her life as collateral. It was impressively pragmatic, and I tried to forget the fact that I liked her while Seawoll negotiated terms. Eventually, they came to an agreement, though most of the security talk went right over my head. At any rate, she opened her mouth politely, and let Seawoll pour a couple drops onto her tongue.

He summoned a stack of parchment and a quill and pointed his wand at them. “ _Dictum_ ,” he said, and the wand jumped up, ready. Quickly he went through the list of people in the room with him and then nodded at Varvara. “Your name?”

“Varvara Sidorovna Tamonina,” she said easily.

“And are you currently under the influence of Veritaserum?”

“Yes.”

“And did you take that of your own free will and with full knowledge of what the effects would be?”

“Yes.”

“Fantastic,” he muttered. “Who do you work for?”

“At the moment, still you, technically, though I have a feeling I’m fired,” she said brightly.

“You bet you are. Who else?”

She talked with little prompting and without any apparent shame: she’d never met the man personally, and all negotiating had been done through an intermediary. She certainly didn’t know his name. She was a contract worker who’d been contacted through the usual channels, asked to get a post at Hogwarts school, and then find where the once-Arithmancy professor had kept his old lab and acquire the materials. Yes, she’d been told about the Nightingale; no, she didn’t know how the Faceless Man had known. She rather thought he knew about Mellenby’s research from a little historical digging—it was all there if you bothered to read the books, or so it had been implied to her. No, she didn’t know what he specifically wanted it for. She hadn’t asked. He’d been paying her very well, and that was the only question she’d been interested in the answer to.

Thomas did ask about Awa Shambir, but she just shook her head and said she’d never met anyone of that name or description while working for the Faceless Man. And as far as she knew, she was the only person working the Hogwarts angle. She didn’t much like hangers-on.

The three of them got into asking about her history—apparently she’d been a criminal for a very long time, which Seawoll did not look happy his background check had missed—and I sat there, thinking about things.

“How’d you find the Chamber of Secrets?” I said when there was a break in the talking. “Sure, you knew he was a Parselmouth, but no one knew where that thing was.”

“I followed you two, of course,” she said. She shook her head admiringly. “The pipes in a girls’ lavatory? I never would have found it otherwise.”

“All right,” I said slowly. That made sense, since the timing was too coincidental otherwise. “But you can’t have been following us every day since you found out about the Parseltongue. You wouldn’t have had time to do anything else.”

“Of course not. I was only following you today.”

I stared at her. “Which was…luck?”

She laughed. “Wouldn’t it be nice to be that lucky! No, I realized there was just no finding the thing without help, so I asked for some. The Nightingale was the only person who was even remotely likely to just know where it was, so I made sure he found out what it was I was after, and then I followed him when he went to protect it. After that, the plan was to distract him and try to steal it when he was otherwise occupied—the basilisk would’ve served well if you hadn’t noticed me in that tunnel.”

“You made sure he found out what you were after,” I repeated dumbly.

She gave me a pitying look. “I wouldn’t be so quick to trust your pretty blonde friend, Peter.”

#

I made myself listen to the rest of the interrogation, but I barely understood it. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t process it. Lesley—she wouldn’t. I knew that. I did. But there was no other way Varvara could’ve known to follow us today, right to the Chamber and all of David Mellenby’s regrets, and that was besides that fact that I’d watched her take Veritaserum I’d brewed myself.

They finished, and Seawoll sent Stephanopoulos out with Varvara and a message for the Aurors. He fixed me with a gimlet eye. “Is May undercover?”

I nodded weakly.

“With him?”

I nodded again.

He sighed. “You know you shouldn’t know that, right? I’m going to have to tell her superiors.”

I stared at him. “That’s it?”

He shrugged. “What else is there? May was doing her job, and she was doing it better than when she told you about the assignment. He told her to sell out a friend, and she did it—he’ll trust her more than ever now. With any luck, we might start to get somewhere catching this bastard.”

Thomas put his hand on my shoulder. “He’s right, Peter,” he said gently. “She was doing the right thing.”

He _was_ right, but that didn’t mean I felt any better about it. It didn’t mean it quieted the little voice in my head that kept saying that shouldn’t have mattered. That I was more important than her job. That she wouldn’t do that to me anyway, fuck the Aurors and fuck their investigation—not to me. Not after everything.

I shrugged my shoulders, which dislodged Thomas’s hand, and I glanced over at him. “Uh, Headmaster, sir, about Mellenby’s research.”

Thomas tensed.

“What about it?” Seawoll said, already getting up and heading for his drinks’ cabinet. “Merlin, it has been one blasted fucking hell of a day.”

Not a good time, then. I persisted anyway. “I’m pretty sure you could make a pretty good case for Hogwarts owning it and not the Ministry or his family, between the fact that he did the work here and his family gave his estate to the school after he died anyway.”

He turned around and crossed his arms. “Yeah? And why would I want to?”

I opened my mouth to start in on the many and varied benefits Hogwarts would get, as a research institute, from such revolutionary material, but Thomas got there first.

“Because,” he said quietly, “I would very much like it if it didn’t end up in the Department of Mysteries.”

“Would you,” Seawoll said flatly.

There was another of those moments where I was clearly missing some salient part of the conversation, and then Thomas said, “Yes.”

Seawoll’s mouth twisted. “Fine. I’ll have some lawyer-types put their heads together.” He waved his hand. “Now get the hell out of my office.”

We stood up to get, which is when my feet informed me that actually, they’d had quite enough for the day, and I’d have to go on without them. I sat down heavily again, unable to keep the gasp of pain between my lips, and Thomas caught my arm.

“ _Peter_ ,” he said. “You said you were fine.”

“Adrenaline,” I bit out, gritting my teeth. “I didn’t notice until we were out of the Chamber, and then I figured we had better things to do.”

“You bloody idiot,” Seawoll said. “Not being a hero about injuries is lesson fucking one if you’re going to play Auror. Thomas, get him to the damn hospital wing.”

#

I had a moment between Thomas dumping me on the clean white sheets of a bed in the infirmary and him coming back with Abdul to yell at me some more, and I pulled out my Lesley notebook without thinking about it and stared at the cover. I had a self-inking quill between the pages as a bookmark, and I picked it up, rolling it between my fingers and feeling the stiffness of the feather blade. I couldn’t think what to say.

A drop of ink rolled off the tip of the quill and fell onto the cheap parchment, staining it, and just like she’d been waiting for it—waiting for me—Lesley wrote underneath, _Peter?_

I stared at the word. I knew her handwriting so well: wide and messy, the top of the curve of the P starting way back from its stem, the E going straight into the T without a gap. I’d seen her write my name so many times in notebooks just like this one. It was almost more familiar to me than my own damn signature.

_Peter?_

She was just doing her job. It wasn’t about me. I could’ve died, but it wouldn’t have been about me. Funny how much better that didn’t make me feel.

_Yeah,_ I wrote. _I’m here._

I imagined her sighing in relief, but this thing didn’t have a video function, so for all I knew her expression didn’t change at all.

_How was your day?_ she said.

Vague, that. Maybe he was hanging over her shoulder staring at everything we wrote. Maybe he’d spy on it later. Maybe she just didn’t want me to figure out she’d set me up if I didn’t know already.

_Shitty,_ I told her, which was true enough.

_Yeah,_ she wrote back immediately. _Mine too._

I stared at the words, with the feeling that that was as much of an apology as I was going to get. I tried to work out if it made me feel better, but my feet and knees and shins hurt too much, and my palms were still stinging, and I gave up. _Talk to you tomorrow,_ I scratched out, and then, without waiting to see if she responded, closed the thing, shrunk it, and shoved it into my pocket again.

Varvara Sidorovna Tamonina had wondered about the spark of life, animal transfiguration, and how to get research subjects for a unicorns-and-virginity study. Today, she’d tried to kill me. Lesley had been my best friend for fourteen years, and today she’d almost gotten me killed. It wasn’t the same thing. I knew that. But it felt damn similar.

I eased myself back, lying flat on top of the bedspread, my feet—still with my shoes on—just at the end, not quite poking up. I was probably dirtying their nice clean linens. My mother would’ve been horrified. I stared at the ceiling until Abdul and Thomas came in.

“This really doesn’t look like tenth century architecture to me,” I said to them without looking over, and I heard one set of footsteps slow briefly.

“Are you sure he’s injured, Thomas?” Abdul said dryly. “He sounds all right to me.”

Thomas ignored him, and his quick footsteps took him straight to the side of the bed, where he leaned over to look into my eyes, frowning. Considering I’d been unable to walk, and now I was collapsed onto a hospital bed like I couldn’t sit up either, his worry might’ve been justified.

“I’m fine,” I told him, pushing myself into a sitting position with my elbows, to avoid putting pressure on my skinned palms. “Or—as fine as I was before.”

“That’s not reassuring,” he said, putting his hand on my back to steady me. I could feel the pressure of it, warm and broad, against my shoulder-blades.

“Thanks,” I said, leaning against him just enough that he’d stay there, but not so much I’d worry him more. Which was maybe underhanded, but it got him to shift closer to me, putting the side of his body against mine. He was warm and solid, and I decided I didn’t care.

“All right, Peter,” Abdul said, coming up to the bed and scrutinizing me. Thomas tried to move a little farther away when he did, but I rested a little more of my weight against him, and he stood closer again. “What seems to be the trouble?”

“I—” It took me a moment to remember that Varvara being evil wasn’t common knowledge yet, even among the staff, and Seawoll probably wouldn’t appreciate me running my mouth. But Abdul was going to find out, surely, and I honestly couldn’t think of a reasonable cause for my injuries that wasn’t ‘duel.’ “Someone cast a spell to drop the temperature of the ground I was kneeling on to way below zero,” I said at last. I held up my hands. “My palms were on it for about half a second, and even they’re not doing fantastic.”

Abdul took my wrists in his hands gently and examined my hands. “This is not a good prank.”

“Wasn’t a prank.”

“Really.” He and Thomas traded a look, and then he said, “I assume I’ll be hearing more details later?” Without waiting for a response, he added, “And Thomas, where were you when all this was happening?”

Thomas’s hand on my back clenched for a moment, gripping my shirt, but his expression didn’t change. “Otherwise occupied.”

“Saving me from something a lot bigger and worse,” I said quickly. “Believe me, I’m really glad he was otherwise occupied. Besides, I’m fine.”

“We’ll see about that,” Abdul said, but not without good humor. He waved his wand briefly over my hands, and the raw skin healed over instantly—still a bit pink and new-looking, and when I pressed my fingers into my palms, it was a bit sensitive, but nothing like it had been before. He eyed my legs. “If you’re injured from the knees down, I’d rather not mess about—are you particularly attached to those trainers?”

I looked at my feet and sighed, but I’d spent enough time as a kid losing articles of clothing, toys, and everything else I owned to, it seemed to me, the entire population of Sierra Leone—or at least the families my mother wasn’t feuding with at the time. I knew not to get attached. “I’ll add a shopping trip next time I go to Hogsmeade.”

“Good man. _Evanesco_.” My trainers—and socks—Vanished instantly, and Abdul made a hissing noise, seeing my feet. “Merlin and Morgana, Peter. I don’t think ‘dropped below zero’ begins to cover it.”

I looked down at my feet and blinked. They’d gone pale and blotchy, with blisters forming on the toes. I knew enough to be grateful that there weren’t any blue-black, dead patches, but they didn’t look good anyway—apparently, I’d lingered on Varvara’s ice too long. “Oh. That’s not good.”

“No, it isn’t.” He inspected my feet for another moment, gesturing for me to move them one way, then another, then lift them up a bit, while we established that, yes, in fact, they hurt a fair bit. He gestured for me to relax again and looked up with a smile. “Oh, stop looking so murderous, Thomas, it’s nothing I can’t fix.”

“I think I fucked up my knees too,” I admitted. “Are you going to Vanish my pants, or am I allowed to keep those?”

He negotiated down to just cutting off the bottom half, in the interests of my rapidly departing dignity, and I took the opportunity to tease Thomas about his ridiculous clothes—he was lucky it was mine getting damaged, is all, considering how posh he dressed.

He ignored me. “You’re bleeding.”

I looked where Abdul had extracted my right knee, in fact bleeding sluggishly over the blisters and fucked up looking skin. “Oh, right. I think that happened when I had to duck a spell. I hit the ground pretty hard. At least the cold made it go numb?”

“Peter. Next time I ask you if you’re all right and you’re not, please say so.”

I took another look at my blotchy, blistered knees, one of them bloody and terrible looking. “I’ll keep it in mind.”

“A good rule to live life by,” Abdul agreed, and patted me on the elbow. “I’m going to get some salve for these. And a pain potion for you, as healing frostbite is not particularly pleasant. Try not to die in the meantime?”

I assured him I’d do my best, and he went back to his office.

Thomas was still frowning at my knees and feet—luckily, my shins didn’t look so bad, just red and a bit shiny—and I elbowed him gently. “I’m in one piece, you know.”

“As opposed to what?” a voice said, and I turned to the door to see Jaget and Sahra walk in, both looking annoyed with us. Thomas took a smooth step away from me, his hands going first into his pockets, then behind his back, then to hang at his sides. His face was completely even and blank of emotion. I caught myself with my hands, and the sheets scratched against the new skin.

“I thought we were working together,” Sahra said. “What the hell?”

“It all sort of happened at once,” I protested. “We didn’t mean—hang on, why am I justifying this? You two are students! I’m supposed to feel bad I didn’t bring you to the gun fight?”

“Sahra’s going to be an Auror next year,” Jaget pointed out, sitting in the chair by my bed as Sahra boosted herself up to sit sideways besides me. “She’s already been accepted.”

“And Jaget’s got a job waiting for him at Gringotts as a Curse-Breaker.” Sahra crossed her arms over her chest. Her hijab today was vibrantly Eye-of-Sauron red-orange, and I felt like it was judging me. “We’re probably better at Defense than you are, Potions Professor.”

“As the individual teaching both of you that subject,” Thomas interrupted mildly, “while your facility with spells is impressive, Peter did as well as anyone, of any skill level, might have reasonably been expected to. And he, of course, isn’t seventeen.”

“Eighteen,” Jaget said, but he shrugged. “I get it. Liability, right? But I wish you’d brought us anyway.”

“And we honestly weren’t _planning_ on getting into a fight,” I said, though in retrospect, that was probably more of a reason to bring them than leave them. Honestly, I hadn’t brought it up, and neither had Thomas—I don’t think either of us had wanted him to have to tell that whole, long, horrible story again. “How come you two knew I was in here, anyway?”

“Abigail Kamara gave me a heads-up that you were being weird outside Seawoll’s office, and then Jaget saw you getting levitated through the halls like an invalid,” Sahra said. “Add in a fainting couch and you would have made the perfect Victorian maiden.”

I made a rude gesture at her and immediately felt unprofessional. She grinned at me, like she knew.

“What happened anyway?” she said. “Did you get Shambir?”

“Wasn’t her,” I said, just before I remembered I probably shouldn’t. “I mean—”

“It wasn’t?” Jaget made a face. “Damn. Some detectives we make. Who was it?”

“I have a feeling you’ll be able to make some inferences soon,” Thomas said, giving them a quelling look. “But at this particular moment, we’ve been asked not to say.”

“Inferences,” Sahra murmured. “Means when they have to replace another teaching position. In the middle of the year. Again. Bet Seawoll loved that.”

Jaget snorted. “Hope their screening process is better this time.”

“Hey,” I said, “four out of five is a passing grade.”

Sahra laughed. “All right, Professor. What happened to your feet? They look burned.”

Abdul cleared his throat, and all of us except Thomas jumped like naughty schoolchildren. “Nothing you two need to be concerned about just now, and nothing I can’t take care of. Isn’t it nearly curfew? The Head Girl and Boy ought to be doing patrol, I think.”

“Yes, Healer,” Sahra said immediately, hopping off the bed and grabbing Jaget’s arm. She mouthed _later_ at me over her shoulder as they ran out, just out of Abdul’s line of sight, and I grinned, unable to help myself. I liked them.

I tried to disguise the smile by turning to Abdul and saying, “I never would have pegged you as the strict authority figure. Where’d that come from?”

“Well, I don’t mind stretching myself on occasion,” he said with good humor. “If I were you two, I’d be careful about discussing any of that in public places—the students will think you play favorites, and the parents will be horrified you’d tell them anything at all.”

I agreed that he was right, and he gave me a bit of pain potion and started to spread a thick salve on my knees and feet, wrapping them afterwards in heavy bandages. “To keep it from rubbing it off,” he told me. “But you’ll be right as rain by the end of the night, and you can take them off before you go to bed. Leave it until an hour or so after the pain stops.”

“Thanks,” I said. “That means I can leave, right?” I wasn’t going to have any trouble noticing that timer, because even through the potion it stung and burned. I made to push myself off the bed, bracing for the impact, and he caught my arm.

“Oh, no. No walking until the bandages come off. You might be best off staying here for observation, in fact.”

I groaned. “I’m sick enough of English public school food as it is, and everything tastes worse in an infirmary, even if it’s the same stuff. You said I’d be fine. I’m only staying here tonight if you get me something properly spicy.”

He smiled ruefully. “Outside my capabilities, I’m afraid, though I sympathize. If you feel that strongly about it, Thomas can float you again—”

“No,” I said immediately, thinking of Sahra’s ‘Victorian maiden’ comment.

“Then if must leave and go back to your room, I’ll get you a wheelchair.” When he saw my surprise, he smiled. “Sometimes the Muggle solutions are the best ones.”

#

Thomas helped wheel me back to my room, which I didn’t protest, even though I probably could’ve done it myself. It gave me the chance to drag him down onto the couch in front of the unlit fire with me when he made to leave.

“Nope,” I said. “We need to talk.”

He sat and lit the fire with a quick, economical motion of his wand. His posture and face were relaxed enough that if not for the sharp flick on the end that sent a couple sparks flying off to land harmlessly on the carpet, I might’ve thought he was completely calm. “About what?”

“I would really like to go on a date with you,” I said, as bluntly as I could. “And I’m getting the impression that you’d like that too. I’m pretty sure you like me, and I know you liked it when I kissed you. So what gives?”

His face did something complicated: shocked and then chagrined and then uncomfortable and then a little sad and then blank. “Peter, I don’t—” He stopped.

“If the rest of that sentence is ‘feel that way about you,’” I said, “I’ll drop it.” I leaned over and put my hand on his knee, and I felt the muscle jump, even though his face didn’t change. “But I don’t think it is.”

He looked down at my hand and didn’t raise his head to meet my eyes again. He said, very quietly, “I don’t want to take advantage.”

My brain skipped like one of my father’s vinyl records—that is, if he ever let them get into the kind of condition where they might skip. “Sorry, you what?”

He sighed and stood up, dislodging my hand as he did, and walked to stand next to the mantel, staring at the fire instead of looking at me. “Peter, I know how I look, but I’m more than four times your age. It’s not…appropriate. For me to do something like that.”

“Fuck, okay, no,” I said, starting to stand up as well, before I remembered I couldn’t. “Please stop patronizing me.” He did shoot a look at me then, surprised and a little wary. “This is one area where you’re allowed to make unilateral decisions—if you don’t want to date me, we’re not going to date. But you’re not allowed to make decisions about what is or isn’t good for me, and for the record, I’m twenty _-_ five. I’m a legal adult in Wizarding and Muggle Britain. I have my adult teeth, my adult height, and psychologically, my adult brain.”

“I’m fairly certain you don’t get a new brain when you get older.”

“Don’t try to distract me into explaining developmental psychology to you,” I snapped. “Tell me to fuck off if you want me to fuck off, but I don’t need to be sheltered from you wanting to have sex with me.”

He flinched.

“You do, right?” I said. “You want to have sex with me. You look at me like you want to have sex with me.”

He actually closed his eyes, turning away from me and looking so viscerally miserable I had to take a deep breath and stop. I didn’t understand why he was unhappy, but I did understand that I didn’t want him to be and that I wasn’t helping.

“Sorry,” I said quietly, even though I wasn’t quite sure I was. I wasn’t even totally sure what I was apologizing for. I scratched at one of the bandages on my right knee while I thought, and then I looked at the hunch of his shoulders, his back to me, and levered myself to my feet. It hurt like a fucking bitch. I took two careful steps closer to him and said, as gently as I could, “You’re allowed to want things, you know. You’re allowed to have the things you want.”

“I know that,” he said, sounding exhausted, and I thought: am I right? Is that it?

I took another unsteady, agonizing step. “You can have me.”

“Peter,” he said, and turned. And blinked. “ _Peter_. You shouldn’t be standing, your feet—” He crossed the remaining steps to me, grabbing hold of my upper arms in a firm grip and trying to walk me back towards the couch. “You’re still injured.”

His voice was thick with concern, and I resisted his attempts to push me backwards, catching his face in both my hands and holding it gently, my index fingers at the creases at the corners of his eyes. He went abruptly and completely motionless. “Tell me this isn’t actually about how old I am.”

“It isn’t,” he whispered. I could feel his jaw move against my hands. “Not the way you’re thinking.”

“Good,” I said. “Because I basically think you’re gorgeous and amazing and seriously, seriously sexy, and I have a deeply embarrassing thing for you. Ask anyone.”

I saw the tiniest smile touch the corners of his mouth, like beginning of a suppressed laugh, and I was already feeling hopeful when he said, “Peter, you—”

“Thomas,” I agreed. “ _You_.”

And then he did laugh, one uncontrolled snort of happiness, his eyes squeezing shut as he shook his head, and I was already grinning back when he took a deep breath, like he was preparing himself, and then he leaned up and kissed me.

It was a light touch, close-mouthed and barely there, but it lingered. He lingered, in my space, with his lips against mine, holding my arms and his face still cradled in my hands. I was afraid to move in case he changed his mind.

“Peter,” he murmured against my lips, barely moving away from me. “Please sit down.”

I remembered, like a knee to the groin, that I had healing frostbite and couldn’t walk.

Getting back to the couch was about as much fun as having bones regrown, but the moment the backs of my legs hit the cushions, I grabbed Thomas by the tie and tugged him down on top of me. He resisted for a moment, but then he followed my pull, catching himself with one hand on the seatback and the other on the arm of the couch I was leaning against, bracketing me in.

“Hey,” I said, putting my hand on his waist and pressing my thumb against the jut of bone at his hip. I wanted to grab him and pull him even closer, right onto my lap.

“Be careful.” He lowered himself down onto the couch next to me, close enough that I could feel his leg all along mine. “I might’ve fallen on you.”

“Fuck careful,” I said, and dragged him into another kiss just to see if he’d let me. And he did, though I could feel the hesitation there again, the moment when he thought about it. There was still a line of tension through his body, even as he put his hand on my shoulder and pulled me closer. I kissed him for as long as I could ignore it, and then I moved away. “Do we need to talk more about this?”

“No,” he said immediately.

“Not that I don’t believe you, but are you sure?”

“Yes,” he said. He opened his mouth like he was going to say something else, but then he closed it again, looking frustrated. “I—Peter, I—” He shook his head. “We don’t need to talk about anything. This is—”

“This isn’t the most convincing romancing I’ve ever gotten, so you know,” I told him, but my hands were already coming up to touch him. I couldn’t help it. I’d been wanting to have him here with me since he’d smiled at me in his office. I’d been wanting him, period.

He smiled a little, and that was more reassuring than anything he’d managed to articulate so far. “Oh?” he said softly. “Let me attempt to do better, then.”

And then he leaned forward and kissed me properly, deep and heavy, with as much genuine feeling as I’d felt from anyone.

My feet still hurt, and my knees ached, and my shins itched, and it wasn’t the best kiss I’d ever had, but I didn’t care. I got one hand into the soft, short hairs at the nape of his neck, and I hooked two fingers of the other into the belt loop at his hip to tug him closer. I coaxed him into long, wet kisses, slow and easy, and then he groaned, and I swear, I felt the leftover resistance go out of him all at once. He let me pull him close, and he ended up half-kneeling awkwardly over me on the couch, and then he laughed into my mouth when he almost lost his balance and had to flail a hand out to catch himself.

“Here,” I said. “Come on, come here.”

“Your legs.” I could feel everything he said against my lips, like punctuation.

“The frostbite ends at the knees,” I assured him. “Come _on_.”

He gave up, then, and let me pull him into position: on my lap, his knees on either side of my thighs, one hand bracing himself on my shoulder and the other against the side of my head.

“Just so you know,” I said, when I needed a second to breathe, “we had better be—what’s the appropriately antiquated terminology? Going steady? We’d better be going steady now.”

Thomas laughed, beautifully, looking delighted. His face was flushed, and I’d managed to thoroughly mess his hair. “That’s actually well after me, I’m afraid.”

I gave him another quick kiss, and he leaned into it. “Hmm. Courting?”

“Better,” he agreed. “Except that we’re both men, not going to prison, and absolutely no one’s parents are involved.”

“And thank fuck for that,” I said fervently. “Stay the night?”

“We’re not going to bed together.” I drew back to glare at him, and he made an exasperated sound and poked one of my knees pointedly. “Peter, you can’t even stand.”

Oh, right. “So? Lying down’s favorite, in my experience.”

“No, Peter.”

“Careful,” I said, trying to look serious, but I could feel the smile breaking out at the edges. “I might start to get the impression you aren’t interested.”

He smiled briefly, and kissed me again, slow and long and languid, and then once more. “Don’t.”

#

I woke up sometime in the middle of the night, lying on my side underneath the covers. I wasn’t sure what brought me out of sleep, but when I blinked my eyes open, there was bright moonlight on my face. I realized my curtains were open, and that the moon must be full: a night for werewolves. Unless you were in Nazi Germany, in which case every night was probably a night for werewolves.

It was that thought that made me wonder about Thomas, slowly, as if I were still dreaming a bit. He’d stayed the night after all, just to sleep, and last I remembered, he’d been curled up next to me in borrowed clothes with his breathing evening out. He was sitting up now, his thigh a few inches from my nose. I could feel the warmth of it, and I yawned contentedly, which moved my head just enough that I finally registered the light touch of two fingers just resting on the side of my neck.

I yawned again and looked up at him, still asleep enough not to be worried. He was sitting up in bed, looking out the window, even paler than usual in the moonlight. He’d stolen a sweatshirt of mine from somewhere and was wearing it against the draft from the windowpane, unzipped, his back straight and his face distant—as if he weren’t in my room with me at all but a million miles away. I didn’t think he’d even realized I was awake, though his fingers were still resting on my neck. I pushed myself up on my elbows, and then into a sitting position, and slung my arms around his waist, my chin hooked over his shoulder, my chest against his back. He didn’t react or seem surprised, so maybe he’d felt me wake up after all.

“Hey,” I said quietly, and he made a humming noise of acknowledgement. “Were you taking my pulse?”

“Ah. Yes.” He sounded embarrassed, so I kissed the bit of skin closest to my mouth, right at the base of his neck. I felt him shiver just slightly, and then he sighed and leaned his head sideways to rest against mine.

“Nightmare?”

“Of a sort. Not really about…anything.” He sighed, and one of his hands came to join mine at his waist. I reached out and took it, tangling our fingers together, and he held on tightly. “Must we…” He didn’t finish.

“Talk about it?” I guessed. “Not if you don’t want to.”

He didn’t say anything, but he did squeeze my hand briefly.

“Been a long day,” I offered. “Not a very good one, either.”

He pulled forward and far enough to his left that he could look over his shoulder and meet my eyes, smiling faintly. “Some of it was all right.”

New relationships are kind of like practicing Cheering Charms. Every time you remember them, it’s like getting hit in the stomach with pure, giddy joy, so abrupt and strong it feels artificial. I could feel myself grinning stupidly, and his smile widened in response. I cleared my throat and tried to moderate my expression, but I don’t think I was very successful—at any rate, he looked properly happy and a bit less distant when I said, “Yeah, it was. Have I mentioned how completely gorgeous you look in my clothes?”

He laughed, but barely. “I rather like wearing them, if it comes to that. How are you feeling? The frostbite?”

I’d gone to bed still wearing the bandages and salve Abdul had gave me, since due to what I assume was a combination of adrenaline crashing, being injured, and the whole harrowing experience of the entire bloody day, I’d been completely knackered. The healing hadn’t gone quite as fast as advertised, which Thomas had informed me sternly was my own fault for trying to walk before I was allowed. But he’d said so in between kisses to my jaw, so I can’t think he was upset with me, as such.

But I was pain-free at the moment, so I shrugged, kicked the blankets off—letting in a blast of cold air and causing Thomas to shiver and shift a little closer to me, so a net win—and fumbled for my wand on the bedside table. Luckily, the hand Thomas was still holding was my left, and I didn’t have to let go. I pushed the soft cotton trackpants I’d been wearing up over my knee, and tapped first one leg, then the other, and said, “ _Evanesco_.”

Much easier than messing about with unwrapping, the bandages simply disappeared. There was no sudden resurgence of pain, but I couldn’t actually see well enough to check for lasting injuries, even in the bright moonlight. “ _Lumos minima_ ,” I whispered, and shone the resulting dim light over us. It wasn’t so strong as to hurt my eyes, adjusted as they were to the darkness, but it gave me enough visibility to be able to tell that the blisters, at least, were all gone—which was good enough for me.

I brought the blankets back up over our laps, and then I extinguished the light and replaced my wand on the table. “Magical healing strikes again.”

“Glad to hear it.” And he did sound glad, but he also still seemed a bit subdued, and I thought whatever had him staring out the window and taking my pulse probably hadn’t passed yet.

I drew him back against my chest and rubbed the rounded bone of his wrist with my thumb. “Hey,” I said. “Where are you right now?”

“Nowhere,” he said, too quickly. “With you.” And then, in an odd, almost whimsical voice: “I would miss you, if you weren’t here.”

“Yeah?” I replied, almost automatically, as a placeholder to hold the conversation there while I thought furiously. Whatever that had meant, I didn’t think it was anything good. “If you weren’t here, I’d go looking for you.”

With my arms around him, I could feel him inhale and exhale, but I still might’ve imagined the stutter in his intake of breath then. He was silent and still for the space of a few steady heartbeats, and then he raised the hand of mine he was holding and opened it gently, one finger at a time. He leaned down and pressed his mouth to it, tenderly, kissing the soft center of my palm. His lips, a little chapped, scratched just slightly against my new and still-sensitive skin, and I went from concerned and still sleepy to half-hard in less than a second.

“Peter,” he said. “How tired are you?”

I swallowed. “Increasingly less.”

“Oh, good.” He turned in my arms, slid one hand up to cup the back of my head, and kissed me very thoroughly. It was open-mouthed and wet, and it got positively filthy in so short a time that my head spun.

I was unbearably turned on, but I couldn’t help the niggling worry that now _I_ was the one who should be afraid of taking advantage. He seemed a bit vulnerable at the moment, and after all, he was the one who kept saying no—and then I had a thought. I examined it from all angles and decided that yes, I definitely liked it, so I drew myself away from him just enough to talk and said, “Thomas. Tell me what you want?”

I thought I saw him smile in the moonlight, but with his back to the window, it was hard to tell. He didn’t say anything, at any rate, just pushed me down onto the bed, lying half on his side next to me and half on top, and kept kissing me. I wanted to go along with it as badly as I’d wanted magic at eleven, but I made myself push him away, and he stopped.

“That’s not telling me what you want.” I tried for firm, but my voice came out hoarse and well-kissed. “What do you want?”

“And here I didn’t think I was being terribly subtle,” he said. He rocked his hips against my leg, and yes, God, the thin trackpants I’d lent him to sleep in did nothing to disguise the stiffening line of his cock. “I know you’re clever.”

“Not the point,” I choked out, over the sudden rush of blood away from my brain. I ignored it, with difficulty. “I want you to tell me what you want.”

He drew back a little, though he didn’t go far. “Peter?”

“You haven’t actually said yet that you want me,” I told him. “Which feels unfair. I want to hear you say what you want. I want to hear you say exactly what you want me to do to you. I want to hear you say you want _me_.”

Plus, bonus explicit consent, but I wasn’t going to tell him that part. For some reason, I didn’t think he’d like knowing I’d thought about whether he was making bad, nightmare-adjacent choices. Good relationships are all about tricking your partner in sexy ways. It’s the little things.

“Um,” he said, sounding a bit strangled. I tried to remember if I’d ever heard him say that before, inelegant and inarticulate. “That’s not—”

When he broke off and didn’t start again, I decided to push, just a little. I surged up and knocked him onto his back so that I was on top, one of my legs between his, bracing myself with my hands bracketing his shoulders. At this angle, the moonlight fell right onto his face, so I could see the way his eyes widened with shock and then the bob of his throat as he swallowed and licked his lips. I filed that away as something he’d definitely enjoyed, and said, “If you ask me for something, I’ll give it to you.”

I could hear him breathing and see the rise and fall of his chest. He was dressed in my clothes, top to bottom—I wondered if they’d smell like him in the morning or if he smelled like me now instead. “Peter,” he said, hoarse. “I want—” He stopped.

I grabbed one of his hands and laced our fingers together, pressing it into the mattress. “Yeah,” I said, coaxing. He bit his lip, and I thought, _He’s not going to do it._ “Thomas, tell me. Come on.”

He licked his lips again, right over the spot he’d been biting. I had to focus very hard on not kissing him again. “I—I do want you,” he said. His voice was very soft, and he closed his eyes, like the words were being dragged out of him. “Of course, I—of course I do, Peter.” His eyes blinked open again, and he reached out to touch my jaw with his fingertips, so lightly I could barely feel it. “Even just looking at you is…”

He didn’t say anything more, but I didn’t need him to. Hearing it was even better than I’d thought, and something like desperation burned in me just from that, hot and wild. I fell on him, half in pure need and half out of some kind of stunned gratitude that he’d pushed past his boundaries to meet me halfway. I kissed him hungrily: deep, hot presses of my lips and tongue that he opened for easily. I pinned him down against the bed, and he pushed up against me with a low sound of pleasure as I drew my free hand I down his side, a heavy weight that I imagined let me feel every muscle and bone.

“You liked that,” he said, when I managed to put enough space between our mouths to stop kissing him quite so urgently. He sounded softly surprised.

That made two of us, since I hadn’t expected that strong a reaction either. “I learn new things about myself every day,” I admitted.

“Mm.” He ran a hand down my back and then rucked up the hem of my shirt and splayed his fingers at the small of my back. I thought he might be a bit pink from exertion. “I want you to take your shirt off.”

I didn’t even bother replying, just let go of him and sat up on my heels, straddling one of his legs, the other stretched out by my hip, and grabbed the back of my shirt, pulling it over my head. I tossed it away from me without consideration and let him look. I’d swear I could feel his hot eyes on me, their slow progression from collarbones to hips, like a physical caress.

“Merlin,” he said, sounding slightly stunned. And then, “Oh, stop looking so smug.”

I laughed. I couldn’t help myself. I developed a running habit as a kid that I’ve never kicked, so I’m fairly fit, but it never fails to surprise people. “I’ll try,” I said, attempting a serious expression. “Ask me for something.”

He drew his fingers down the thick line of hair underneath my belly button. “And you’ll give it to me.”

“Yeah.”

I saw him swallow hard, twice, and when he raised his eyes to meet mine, it seemed to take an effort. “I want—take my shirt off?”

“Fuck.” It came out as a croak. I felt like I’d been Stunned: dizzy and stupefied with lust, my heart jumping in patterns I was sure weren’t healthy. “Just to be absolutely clear, you mean that you want me to take your shirt off, not that you’re going to take it off yourself, right?”

“Ah…”

“ _Please_ ,” I said fervently, which was maybe breaking the rules of the game by making it so clear what I personally wanted, but I didn’t care.

“Yes,” he said. “That’s what I meant.”

“Thank you,” I said nonsensically. “God, I absolutely want to undress you. Sometime I want to take one of those suits off of you, take forever about it, piece by fucking piece—” I pushed my hands under the hem of the thin t-shirt he was wearing in time to feel his sharp intake of breath, his stomach sucking in abruptly under my fingers. His skin was soft and warm, and it took me a minute to remember that I had a goal and then another to make myself pull my hands away and put them on his shoulders, pushing at sides of the open sweatshirt he still had on.

“Up,” I said. “Come on, let me get this off of you.”

I had to sit back to let him push himself up, but I was still close enough that it brought us flush together when he straightened, and we forgot ourselves again, grabbing at each other and making eager noises that completely failed to form coherent words but were entirely intelligible anyway— _yes_ and _please,_ mostly. He got his hands around me to splay across my shoulder-blades, clutching there as we kissed again. I bit his lower lip, and he moaned so loudly that I almost tore the sweatshirt, old and well-worn and thin at the seams, in my eagerness to get it off him. I did tear the shirt, deciding it was mine anyway and patience was overrated. It ripped straight down the middle, loudly, and Thomas started like he’d been shocked.

He stared at me and then said, very faintly, “ _Oh_.”

I shoved it off his shoulders and flung it off the bed in the direction of I-didn’t-care-what. “Is me ripping your clothes off you hot for you?” I said, grinning.

“Under no circumstances are you allowed to do that to anything I actually wear out,” he replied immediately, like the words had bypassed his brain and made it out of his mouth on pure instinct. It made him sound a little more grounded, less dazed, and I laughed.

“That’s where the line is, huh? Good to know.” I pushed him lightly, and he went without complaint, huffing out a breath when his back hit the mattress again. I almost wanted to follow, but I sat back on my heels instead, trying to keep my weight off his one thigh, my hands on my knees, and just looked. Apparently, he kept in shape, retired or no, because his arms and vividly white stomach were hard with muscle. By the time I got back up to his face, even in the low, pale light I could tell he was blushing, but he was smiling too. “Now you’re the one who looks smug,” I said. “Deservedly. You are the single sexiest centenarian I have ever seen.”

He laughed, and any awkwardness there melted away. “How many centenarians have you been seeing shirtless?”

“Why, are you jealous?”

“On the contrary, I’m delighted you’ve so much experience bringing pleasure to the elderly,” he said, dry as bone, and I laughed and pinched his side as punishment. I saw the muscles on his stomach jump. “Peter, are you just going to sit there all night?”

“Impatient?” I put my hands behind my back, teasing, and he scowled at me. “You haven’t asked me for anything else yet.”

“Still?”

“I’m enjoying myself.” I brought one of my hands back out and smoothed my thumb over the top of his trousers, flirting with touching skin. “Aren’t you enjoying yourself?”

He smiled, very slightly. “Out of curiosity, is it that you like being told what to do?”

“No,” I said. “Or, I don’t mind, and if my partners like telling me, I like them liking it. But it’s not a specific thing for me. I just like hearing you.”

“Oh.” He reached out to brush one his hands down my arm, a light touch that my hair standing on end anyway, because of the look in his eyes. “Come here?”

I did, leaning over him, and then I stopped, holding myself about an inch away from letting us touch, on my hands and knees. “Here I am.”

“ _Peter_.”

He looked so annoyed with me, and I laughed helplessly. “Yeah?”

“You are unkind.” And then he hooked his free leg over my waist, pulling sharply, and I collapsed on top of him. It brought our hips together, and I gasped harshly at the contact, grinding down before I could stop myself. He said, “ _Oh_ ,” again, and arched his back, exposing the pale column of his throat, and I couldn’t help but kiss it. When his breath hitched, I bit down on the juncture of his neck and shoulder, drawing a wordless cry out of him, and I chased the sound, sucking on that spot and feeling him hitch his hips up against mine.

“Fuck,” I said, getting my mouth off him but not moving away. I pressed my forehead against the pillow next to his head and tried to cool my blood with very little success. “You are so distracting.”

“You stopped. Why did you stop?” He sounded frustrated, and he gasping for breath, panting roughly underneath me. His leg pulled me down against him again as he rolled his hips up. I groaned, low in my throat, my cock heavy and aching and completely not on board with the whole ‘slow’ agenda I was promoting, but didn’t move. “Out of curiosity,” he said again, when I refused to get with the program, “is it that you enjoy driving me insane?”

I thought about it with the brain cells I had left to think about anything. “Actually, yeah, I might enjoy that a bit.”

“ _Very_ unkind.”

I turned my head so I could talk directly into his ear, quietly. “How unkind can I be? I’m giving you everything you ask for.”

“ _Peter_.” His voice broke halfway through my name, and my hips twitched again, helplessly.

“If it’s not enough, all you have to do is say so.”

“I pity your enemies,” he said, and then, almost desperately, “Peter, touch me.”

It was a relief. It was such a relief that I was unprepared for it, for the way all my breath left my body in total fucking gratitude and the knowledge that if he _hadn’t_ said it, I would’ve had to resort to drastic action. It was also unbearably fucking hot and a hell of a stupid, macho ego boost that I could even do that. Make him ask me for it. Make him drop that reticence long enough to admit he needed it. I was going to have to reexamine my kinks at some point, but that could wait until after I was through pressing my leg against the hot, hard, heavy line of his cock, until I was done swallowing the gasping sounds he was making with a kiss, until after I’d finally gotten a hand on him properly, even just over his trousers—

He made a pained, inarticulate sound when I did, like I’d hurt him, and his hips jerked up into my hand once, twice.

“Touch you there?” I said, and he made that noise again. “Words, Thomas.”

“ _Yes_ ,” he cried, and it was the first time I’d ever heard him speak above a normal, inside conversational volume outside of that basilisk fight. It wasn’t quite a shout, but it was loud and thoroughly unrestrained. I could hardly believe my own ears. His leg fell back onto the bed; he arched his back, and we rutted against each other like teenagers. He made a couple attempts at speech, but I kept getting distracted by his bitten-red and spit-slick lips and kissing the words out of his mouth. He grabbed my arse in his hands and pulled our hips together again and again, and then, when I finally let him talk, he said, hooking his thumb in my waistband, “These—you—off, Peter.”

“Good point.” I wasn’t even sure why I was still wearing them, and I kicked them and my boxers off without a second thought, pushing them off the bed where they couldn’t get in my way. “You too, come on.”

His hand slid around my body to circle my cock, and he pressed his thumb against the leaking head and then gave me a pull, from tip to root and back, just once. I swore. He looked entranced by the sight, but then he met my eyes and grinned again, looking distinctly pleased with himself—the same way he had a million years ago in the Great Hall when he’d remembered where Gothic architecture originated. “Isn’t that your job?”

I gaped. I couldn’t help it. He laughed at me, but it got cut off by a gasp of pleasure when I gave him a sharp squeeze through his pants. “Fuck, yes, it is,” I said. “And don’t you forget it.”

“I will endeavor to remember that you are the only person allowed to take off my clothes,” he agreed, “including myself.”

“Nngh,” I said, imagining that. I’m not especially possessive, I swear I’m not—except apparently I might be, because I really liked that idea. I grabbed his trousers and pants and pulled them off together, following them down the bed and tossing them to the side when he obligingly kicked them off his ankles. It brought my mouth level with his cock, flushed red and hard, curving to the side over his stomach. I closed my fist around the base, and he bucked up into it, and then I licked the tip just once, pressing my tongue against the slit and then letting the head slide into my mouth before I pulled off again. “Say yes.”

His hand landed on the back of my head and caught in my hair, which is a gift from my mum and utterly impossibly to run anything through, be it fingers or a comb. He didn’t seem to mind, though, just tightened his grip, pressing against my skull. “You’re—expecting me—to talk?”

“That was five words, and I only needed one.” Absolutely nothing beats oral sex for its sheer ability to drive your partner mental while you get to stay essentially coherent. Not that I don’t find sucking cock—or cunt, for that matter—fairly arousing, but I’ve never actually come from giving head, at least not without some furtive jerking off to assist. And while I like an orgasm as much as the next person, there’s something unbelievably fantastic about making someone else go to pieces while you watch, and it’s a whole lot easier to concentrate on them when you’re not on the edge yourself.

He yanked my hair, which I supposed I deserved. “Peter, _yes_.”

I probably should’ve made him ask for the blowjob properly, but I was too invested in getting my mouth on him. I licked the underside of him again, along the thick vein there, and then I closed my mouth around the thick head and sucked hard.

“ _God_ ,” he said, and his hips jerked abortively. He fisted the hand not in my hair in the sheets, as if he could anchor himself like that. I put the flat of my palm on the lowest part of his stomach and pressed, holding him down against the mattress, and he hissed out a breath between his teeth. He pushed up against it: less like he was trying to shake me off and more like he was trying to see if he could. I didn’t let him, took more of him into my mouth as a distraction and put all my weight into making sure he couldn’t move.

“Oh, _God_ ,” he said again, his voice cracking on the word as his back tried to arch underneath me. I decided he liked that.

I took my time about it, bobbing my head up and down while I sucked and licked and figured out the best ways to take him to pieces. It was the very best kind of learning experience, and while he wasn’t quite coherent enough to play teacher, I didn’t have that much trouble following his gasps and moans of pleasure. He had a habit of holding me in place with the hand on my hand when I was right where he wanted me—I didn’t think he even realized he was doing it, but it was demanding and needy, and I had a fantastic time staying right there and giving it my all.

I jerked him off slowly in time to the leisurely bobs of my head, since I tend to avoid deepthroating on a first go, just in case I fuck it up. After that first thrust, he just stayed right underneath me and shook, like it was taking effort to hold himself still—I’d expected more complaint about the glacial pace I was setting, but he didn’t even try to push me into going faster. I could tell how close he was by the twitches of his cock in my mouth when I did something he particularly liked or by the way he was practically tearing a hole in my sheets, gripping and twisting them in his hand.

“Peter,” he said, and I thought at first it was just more encouragement. “Peter, Peter—no, wait.”

I pulled off so quickly I almost gave myself whiplash, but it was still a couple seconds before I remembered how to use my throat for talking. “Everything okay?” I managed at last. I tried to make my voice as nonjudgmental and reassuring as possible, but it only sounded raw and hoarse.

“Yes,” he said. I pushed myself up on my elbows enough to see that he had his eyes closed, and he groaned and let go of the sheets, throwing his arm over his forehead. “Yes, very.”

Which was a fucking relief, let me tell you. I hadn’t forgotten how odd he’d been about basically everything, start to finish, and if he’d told me to stop, no, actually he’d changed his mind—well, obviously I would’ve. But I wouldn’t have been happy about it.

“I was just wondering,” he went on, oblivious to all of that, thankfully, “if you’d, ah. If you’d possibly like to—”

“Probably,” I said, giddy enough with endorphins and relief that I was back to being a total bastard. “Do you want me to?”

He opened his eyes enough to glare at me. It was a pure you’ve-got-to-be-kidding-me, complete with frustration and utter disbelief. The hand in my hair yanked again, hard.

I yelped theatrically and nipped the inside of his thigh in retaliation, though judging by the way his hips jerked and his hand held me there a moment, I didn’t think he was finding it much of a punishment. “What do you want me to do to you, Thomas?” I said again, and then I kissed him there. I was tempted to leave a hickey, but even just the brief touch of my lips made him inhale sharply, and I was supposed to be waiting, so I didn’t push it.

He panted. “I want,” he said, enunciating ever so clearly with those unbearably posh vowels, “to have you inside of me, please. Do you think you might enjoy that?”

Did I. I think my brain skipped a couple steps after that, since the thinking parts were distracted by the lust blackout I was experiencing. Luckily, I didn’t need much input for the ‘lunge up the bed to kiss the life out of him’ bit of my future, since my body had that well covered without help. I managed to end up cradled between his thighs, one hand on the side of his ribcage and the other on the bed, holding some of my weight off him. He clutched at my shoulders and hauled me closer, and I gave up on politeness and just sprawled on top of him, pinning him down and kissing him and kissing him and kissing him.

“I imagine that was an affirmative,” he said, once I’d had to break away to give both of us a chance to catch our breath.

“Believe me, whenever you want me to fuck you, it’s going to be an affirmative,” I told him seriously. “Please, feel free to let me know any time you’re finding yourself in need.”

“I’ll keep it in mind,” he said. “Provided you _get on with it_.”

“Right,” I said. “Right, I’ve got you.”

I made myself get off him and fumble the drawer of the bedside table open, grabbing blindly for lube and a condom. It’s possible to magically conjure slick, but I’ve never found it a particularly easy spell to cast mid-coitus, and after the third time I set something on fire accidentally, I decided there was something to be said for just buying it. I dropped about five condoms on the floor in the attempt and was sorely tempted to Summon one instead, but—again, I have set things on fire in bed before. It took me three tries to get my fingers to unscrew the cap on the lube, which was absolutely not made easier by the fact that I looked at Thomas halfway through the second try, and he hitched his legs open for me helpfully.

“Am I keeping you waiting?” I said, trying to sound apologetic, but I think it mostly came out turned on.

“Yes,” he said seriously. “I’m getting bored.”

“I’ll have to do something about that,” I said, and I reached over to press my dry thumb just against his rim, grinning when he pushed his hips up into the touch. “Just marking my place.”

He glared at me. “Are you going to open that, or do you require assistance?”

I decided I was going to make it my mission to ensure he couldn’t talk half so formally by the time I was through with him, but I did get the bottle open on the third try by trying not to think about him waiting for me at all. I poured a generous amount on my fingers, stuck the bottle and cap on the windowsill where I could reach them again without spilling it all over my sheets, and let myself look at him again: sprawled out on the bed, with his legs bent and spread apart, making sure I knew exactly where he wanted me. It was almost unbearable how good he looked.

“Finally,” he said. His voice was even, but his eyes were staring fixedly at my slick hand, and he gripped the base of his cock with one hand and squeezed, so I knew better.

“I’m very sorry,” I told him seriously, kneeling between his legs and holding his gaze. “Next time, I’ll get one with a pump top from a Muggle store.”

“See that you do,” he said, even though I’d seen the glimmer of confusion on his face that meant he had no idea what I’d just said. And I didn’t let him get the whole thing out: the last word got cut off by a sharp inhale when I pushed one finger directly into him.

Then I paused. “Well. I guess I’m inside of you.”

It took him a minute to get it, and then he said, “Peter, if you stop right now, I’m going to have you arrested.”

“For what?”

“Killing me, possibly,” he muttered. “ _Peter_.”

I laughed, but honestly, I was so hot for it by then I couldn’t have drawn it out past that if my life had depended on it. “All right,” I said. “All right. I’ve got you.”

I fucked him with the one finger until I had him panting and grabbing at my shoulders, like he thought he could make me go faster that way, and then a little longer. He finally said asked for another in a torn-up sounding voice, and I gave that to him too. I didn’t make him ask for the third, slid it in just before I thought he was totally ready for it, and watched his hips lift all the way off the bed as he said, sounding agonized, “ _Yes_.”

It’s always nice, being right.

I crooked my fingers inside him, and his hands flexed on my shoulders, digging his nails into the skin there. It stung, and I hissed, but I’ve had much worse in the name of giving my partner a good time, so I didn’t let him apologize, just leaned in to kiss him again and said, “Feels good?”

“It—nngh.” His voice choked off into a strangled moaning sound when I did it again, and he hung on to me so hard when I spread my three fingers gently that there was a decent chance I’d have the marks in the morning. His panting, gasping breaths echoed off of the stone walls of my bedroom, harsh and wanton and needy. I was so fucking hard it hurt.

I kissed his sweaty forehead, and then his jaw, and then his glorious mouth, red and puffy from where he’d been biting down on it. “Tell me what you want.”

“Inside me,” he said immediately, and then, when I hesitated, “Peter, _please_.”

I pulled my fingers out of him, and he whined, and then pressed his arm over his mouth as if he could retroactively muffle the sound. “Someday,” I said, trying to keep my voice conversational, even though my hands were shaking as I ripped open the condom and slicked up my cock, “I’m going to make you say ‘fuck me.’”

“I’m sure you will,” he said, and I looked up to meet his eyes, pupils blown wide and dark with lust. “But perhaps I’ll make you work for it.”

I thought about that, about him lying there and waiting for me to make him want it bad enough, trying to keep his mouth shut while I tried to make him lose his mind, and had to grab the base of my cock to keep from losing it. “I am going to _wreck_ you,” I said. My voice came out rough and about an octave lower than usual, and I _saw_ him shudder and his eyes slide shut as he inhaled.

“You already have.” He kept his eyes shut when he said it, which was good, because I’m fairly sure my face did something stupid and affectionate and obvious.

I covered his body with mine again, stretching out on top of him, my cock nudging between his legs, and kissed one of his eyelids. “I’m going to make you feel so, so good.”

He turned his head toward me blindly and I found his mouth again, and he kissed me unbelievably slowly, our tongues sliding together and breath mingling until he wrapped one leg around my waist and pulled me closer. When I drew back, his eyes were open, and he was smiling at me. “Yes,” he said.

I had to pull away a little, up over him, to get the angle right, and he leaned up to kiss me once more as I moved away. He kept his hands on my shoulders, too, like he didn’t want to stop touching me, which made two of us. I got an arm behind the knee he’d had around me, pushing his leg back towards his chest as I lined myself up and thought about making him ask me for it again, but I forgot completely as soon as I saw his softly parted lips, half-lidded eyes, his hair everywhere. He was clearly waiting for me, and I’d like to say that I decided that was good enough, but honestly, I just wanted him too badly.

It took every bit of self-restraint I had not to just thrust in all at once, especially considering how much he seemed to enjoy it when I got a little pushier, but I had a sort of idea—based on the context clues of him being very weird about every aspect of this—that it might’ve been a while for him. I wasn’t going to bet on ‘since the 1940s,’ but I wasn’t willing to totally rule it out, either. So I pushed in excruciatingly slowly, gritting my teeth and watching the way his face shifted: pleasure, a little bit of discomfort as the head of my cock slid into him, a relaxing, and then I slid home and his eyes screwed tightly closed as his mouth opened on a soundless exhale.

“Thomas?” I said, my voice tight with tension from the physical effort of holding myself in place and the worry that I’d hurt him accidentally.

“Oh, _God_.”

He sounded almost drugged, his voice was so thick with pleasure, and I stopped worrying and started smirking. It was probably a good thing his eyes were still closed. “Yeah?” I said, and gave him a very shallow thrust, barely pulling out before I pushed back in. “Feel good?”

“What—ah—what do you think?”

Which wasn’t exactly an answer, though it wasn’t as if I needed one. I did it again, and he pushed his hips against mine, making a slightly dissatisfied sound when I failed to move any faster or harder. I said, “Did you know you have a really bad history of not telling me stuff?”

“Oh, no.” He tried to push up against me again, but without any leverage, it didn’t matter. “You know, instead of insisting on punishing me for all my sins, you could just _have me_.”

“Oh, I’m going to,” I said. “But I’m enjoying this.”

He groaned with impatience and clenched down on where I was buried inside of him. I said, “Oh, _fuck_ ,” and tried not to move, my head dropping forward and my hands making fists in the bedsheets. He’d been tight before, gloriously, but the feeling of him doing that, the vise-like grip around my cock, was overwhelming. I could feel it all through my body. I could feel how hot and slick and perfect he was, and it was still almost nothing to the noise he made when he did it, to the way his back arched like it was just as good for him.

“I think you’d enjoy the other as well,” he said, panting. “And I think you may be being slightly unfair about my history.”

“Yeah?” I said, once I could talk or think or form words again. I punctuated it with another shallow thrust that clearly wasn’t quite what he wanted, but was still enough for both of us that my arms were shaking as he gasped. “The whole thing where you were born in 1900—”

“Oh, yes, that would’ve been easy to bring up.”

“The investigation you were conducting all year—” I did it again.

“Of which you were originally one of the subjects.”

“Everything about why you didn’t want to date me—”

“I think we’re well past that!”

“Come to think of it, I still have no idea why Seawoll hates you—”

“Christ, Peter, could we please not be talking about _Alexander_ right now.”

I laughed breathlessly, leaning down and shoving a little harder this time. He made a high-pitched strangled noise that he tried unsuccessfully to choke off, and I closed my eyes, desperate and hot, the sound was sparking all the way down my spine and straight to my cock. If I had to look at his flushed face and red mouth as well as hear him, I thought I might come then and there. It took effort to say, adding to the list, “Whether or not you want me.”

“I want you,” he said immediately. “I want you, I want you, Peter, of course I want you—”

I almost lost my mind hearing him say it so easily. I wanted to hold him down and give it to him perfectly; I wanted to fuck him so well he’d never forget it, no matter how goddamn immortal he might be. I wanted him to want me that much and to tell me just like that in the morning and tomorrow and the day after and next week. I wanted to tell him I needed him just as badly, that I’d been thinking about exactly this since I’d met him. I pulled all the way out and then slammed forward again—I couldn’t have stopped myself. He cried out, and I said, “It feels good?”

“Peter—”

“ _Tell me_ , come on.” I was fucking him properly now, and it felt almost like too much, the slick hot friction of him on me. The look of him, with his eyes shut and his head thrown back on my pillow.

“ _Yes_ ,” he shouted. “Yes, yes, God—it feels—you feel—it’s—” His voice broke into an incoherent moan, but then he kept talking, like somehow in all of this, I’d managed to blow straight past his filters. “You feel so good, Peter—that— _yes_ —don’t stop. Don’t stop, that feels so good.”

He looked and sounded a complete mess. Not polished, not controlled, just completely out of his head for once. “I’m not going to stop,” I told him. “That’s not even—there’s no way. I’m going to give you everything you want. I’m going to—anything you want.”

And then I turned every bit of my attention to doing just that. I made up for all the time I’d spent teasing him and gave it to him as hard as I could, watching his mouth gaping open around moans of pleasure, the obscene sight of my cock sliding into him over and over and over again. I shifted my hips, changing the angle slightly until his eyes shot open on the end of my thrust, wide and dark, and he said, “Oh, _oh_.”

“There?” I said, even though I knew.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, right there— _please_.”

I would’ve given him anything if he’d asked me for it like that. A proper shag was really the least of it. And I did give it to him. I fucked him as thoroughly as I knew how, nailing his prostate every damn time, and like some sort of miracle he kept talking—telling me how good it felt, saying yes, saying my name over and over, _Peter, Peter, Peter_.

On a list of good things that had happened to me, ever, that ranked pretty high.

I wanted to keep it up forever, trying not to think about the way the heat was building in me, holding on long past where I thought my fraying control could take me. He got a hand on himself at some point, and I probably should’ve done the decent thing and replaced it with mine, but I needed both of my arms to hold myself up and have the right angle to pound into him, and besides, it gave me a pretty good idea of exactly how hard and fast he wanted it. Like research, see—I just timed my thrusts to the movement of his hand, and his face got so nakedly blissful that I knew I had him perfectly. He liked it slower than I would’ve chosen personally, but I ignored the ache in my balls and was rewarded when his pleasure became completely incoherent.

He finally sped his hand up when I was hanging on by the skin of my teeth, each noise he made straining my self-control even closer to my breaking point. I groaned in relief and slammed into him so hard he slid a few centimeters up the bed. He liked that, if the way he choked on an incoherent moan was any indication, and then we were moving together, racing each other to the finish line. I was talking, I realized—encouragement, lavish compliments, everything that came into my head.

“Peter,” he said, the first whole word he’d managed in ages, breathless, his voice breaking in the middle. “I—”

“Yeah.” I managed to lean down far enough to give him a messy, uncoordinated kiss, our noses bumping awkwardly. “Yeah, come on, come for me.”

And he did, with a sound like a _sob_ , his body going rigid and his fingers digging into my shoulders. I thought he might’ve actually broken the skin, and I groaned, looking at him spread out on my sheets and utterly lost to pleasure. I bit my lip, trying to last just long enough to fuck him through it, and when he went limp underneath me, I drove my hips forward once—he made a faint _ah_ sound—and then twice, and then I came so hard it hurt.

My muscles gave out when I was done, and I collapsed on top of him, just barely managing to disentangle my arm from his leg.

We lay there, panting and not speaking. I didn’t think I could—I wasn’t certain I could move at all. After a while, he started to stroke the back of my head gently, and I mumbled a couple of meaningless syllables and turned my nose into his soft hair at the side of his head. Luckily, that put my mouth right by his ear, so I didn’t have to work that hard to say something he could hear. “Good?” I mumbled.

He laughed a little, his breath still coming fast. “Yes, Peter,” he said softly. “Very good.”

“Nn,” I said, by way of reply, and then I gathered myself enough to get off of him. My cock slid out of him with a wet noise, and he shivered, not quite stifling a groan that was involuntary-sounding and overstimulated. If I could’ve got hard again, I would’ve. I wanted to. My body made a valiant effort, but there was no chance in hell, not after the day I’d had, so I just collapsed on my back next to him in bed and gave up. My eyes closed without any instruction from my brain. “I’ll clean up in a minute.”

“Mm-hmm,” he said. There was a tinge of laughter in his voice, and I forced my eyelids back up to see him lying on his side with his head propped on one hand, looking at me and smiling.

“Oh, shut up,” I muttered, and started to lever myself up into a sitting position, but he put his hand on my chest and pushed me back down.

“No, don’t worry about it.” He reached underneath the pillow to where he’d left his wand—paranoid, but then, Lesley did the same thing these days—pulled it out, and wordlessly Vanished the condom, Summoned a towel from the bathroom, and soaked it in warm water, all without so much as getting up in bed.

“Well, you’re useful to have around,” I said.

He laughed again, quietly, and cleaned us up. Feeling the rasp of the terrycloth against my spent cock woke me up a bit, and I noticed with some interest the way he shifted slightly when he moved the towel between his legs. Finding that I did have some energy after all, I sat up and took over for him, relishing the way his over-sensitive muscles twitched and his breath caught when I wiped him down gently.

“I thought you were tired,” he murmured.

“Yeah.” I kissed the side of his head. “But you’re just so hot, see.”

“Oh, well, in that case.”

I kissed his hair again, and then, when he turned his head towards me, his mouth, dry and easy and familiar. Then I offered him the wet towel, grinning. “Dry that off and send it to the laundry hamper?”

“I see I have to do everything around here,” he said dryly, flicking his wand again, but I could see he was smiling through it.

“Only because you’re so much better at it.” I collapsed back onto the mattress, and he followed me down, throwing an arm over my chest and burying his face in the crook of my neck. I realized, with shock and some delight, that he liked to cuddle. I ran my fingers down his spine very lightly, and he shifted closer.

“That tickles, Peter.”

“Sorry.” I put a little more pressure behind my hand, feeling the muscles of his back move as he tightened his arm around me and sighed, sounding pleased. “We’re going to have a date sometime this week, for the record. Dinner or something. We can go to Hogsmeade.”

“Ah…”

I didn’t quite sit up straight and glare at him, but I did go tense all over, and considering he was lying against my side, I knew he could tell. “If you’re about to tell me that we shouldn’t—”

“No!” The arm on my chest tightened, and I breathed out in relief. “That is not what I was going to say. I only thought—it might be nice to go somewhere we were less likely to run into any of our students.”

I had a sudden, visceral vision of Abigail Kamara seeing me on a date and winced, full-body and sudden. Thomas did me the courtesy of not actually laughing, but I could feel the smile pressed against my neck. “You make a compelling point,” I said. “I’m willing to consider some amendments to my previous idea.”

He did laugh at that. “Very magnanimous.” He yawned, settling against me with a noise of contentment I wasn’t totally sure he was aware he’d made. “May we figure out the details at a later date?”

I caught the yawn from him, feeling my body relax back into post-sex lassitude. “Yeah, sounds like a plan.”

“Good,” he said. “Peter…”

He stopped talking, and I blinked my eyes open and poked him in the ribs. “Yeah?”

“I want you to know—” He cut himself off. “That is, I—you—” He stopped talking again, and then he made an impatient sound. “I don’t always find it easy to express myself.”

“Funnily enough, I did notice, yeah.”

I felt him laugh soundlessly, and he kissed my neck. “Yes. I just want you to know that if I ever fail to express how much I—how I feel about—if I ever fail to express how I feel, it’s not about you. I just—there are things I find it difficult to get past.”

I ran my hand down his back again, thinking about that. “Okay,” I said slowly. “If I ask you a yes or no question, can you answer?”

“That feels as though it could become comical rather quickly, but yes, I suppose.”

“Comical and workable just became my new favorite thing,” I assured him. “You’re so lucky talking to people is one of the things I’m best at. Yes or no question: do you like me? Romantically, so we’re clear.”

“Yes,” he said immediately. “Very much. And yes, I am very fortunate.”

I grinned stupidly at my ceiling, feeling helplessly fond and soft, affection for him spilling sloppily over the boundaries of my foundations. “Damn right you are. That works for me. Think you can sleep now?”

He snorted. “Yes, Peter,” he said, and then yawned again. “You’ve worn me out quite thoroughly. Feel free to be smug in the morning.”

Which wasn’t quite what I’d meant, but I thought it answered the question just the same. And I was definitely going to remind him he’d said that when we woke up.

#

It was two days later when I walked into the main room of my living space after class and saw Lesley sitting on the couch. She looked tired, the dark circles under her eyes disturbingly saturated against her pale skin, and there was a greenish bruise on her jaw. Otherwise, though, she looked neater and more put together than I’d ever seen her, everything from ponytail to the cut of her robes clean and styled. Her hair was practically slicked back, it was so severely kept in place.

I paused in the doorway before coming in fully, shutting the door behind me quietly. I leaned back against it instead of crossing over to her, shoving my hands into my pockets. “Hi,” I said.

“Hi.” She didn’t get up.

I tried to remember if I’d ever felt this awkward around her. “You’re here,” I said, and she snorted.

“No kidding, Peter. Keep up.”

“You’re dressed like you shop at Corporate Villains R Us,” I shot back, “so I wouldn’t throw stones.” She rolled her eyes at me, unimpressed, and for a second, it was almost normal. “I meant, how did you get in?”

She shrugged. “Shrieking Shack to the Whomping Willow. That tree isn’t nearly as good for security as they think it is.”

I nodded, making a mental note to mention that to Seawoll and Stephanopoulos next chance I got, but I didn’t let it show on my face. “And how’d you get away from the Faceless Man?”

“I didn’t.” I jumped, half-expecting someone to use that as the perfect dramatic moment to walk out of my bedroom and scare the crap out of me, but she saw and shook her head. “Not like that. He isn’t here; he’s not that stupid. I meant he told me to come and make up with my Hogwarts informant, so I didn’t have to get away from him.”

“Your Hogwarts informant.”

She sighed. “Don’t be deliberately stupid, Peter—his words, not mine.”

“Well, I feel loads better now.” She rolled her eyes at me and opened her mouth to say something, but I shook my head. “Never mind. Are you okay?”

I’d managed to surprise her, I could tell. It was sort of nice to see her be the one off-balance, but it didn’t last long, and if I’m honest, I didn’t want it to. I preferred it when we were in sync.

“Am I okay?” she repeated. “Were you worried?”

“You did what he said, and then we caught Varvara anyway,” I told her. “I was worried he’d think you tipped me off somehow. I didn’t want to ask in the notebook, though, just in—just in case.”

“You _were_ worried.”

“Yeah.”

She eyed me for a long moment, and I wondered what she was thinking. After a moment, she shrugged, looking away to glance indifferently around the room. “Don’t be. I’m fine. He knows I didn’t tell you anything but what he said to.”

“He…knows.”

“Yeah.”

“Right.” I pressed my lips together. “How?”

“He was listening, of course.” She drew up one leg onto the couch, with a foot flat on the cushion and her arms draped loosely around her shin. It was how she’d used to sit when we were kids, doing homework in the library. “I think he’d’ve used Veritaserum, but he hasn’t got much, and I let him make me allergic anyway.”

“You let him fuck around with your allergies?” I didn’t quite yell at her, but I might have raised my voice—just slightly, you understand, me being a calm and rational individual.

She gave me a scathing look. “Better than him being able to stuff me full of truth drug whenever he likes.”

“Still—”

“He can do whatever he likes to me whenever he likes, Peter,” she said impatiently. “It was a test—now he knows I’ll let him do his shit, but he also knows I don’t want to take Veritaserum. Half good, half bad. That’s what matters. Stop focusing so much on minutiae.”

I looked to the side, to a bookshelf Thomas had pushed me up against yesterday just before he’d kissed me and gone to his knees. It was a good memory, and I hung onto it while I resisted the urge to shake Lesley, shake the Aurors, go to London to find the Faceless Man and shake him. I nodded. “You’re right.”

“I’m always right,” she said, shifting until she could sit sideways a bit, leaning one shoulder against the back of the couch. “We both know that.”

The juxtaposition of it—the familiar words and the way she was sitting, with her hair and clothes and the betrayal I wasn’t supposed to think of that way—made my head hurt. I tried to focus on something else. “He was listening? When we were talking on the phone?”

“That’s what I said. Speaker exists, Peter, come on.”

“No, I know, I just—why the hell did you let me go on about Thomas? You had a goddamn ethically challenged wizard breathing down your neck, and you decided that was the moment to berate me about my love life?”

She snorted. “He told me to, if you can believe that. Not like—I don’t think he cares where you stick your dick. He asked me what I could get you to talk about, and I said whatever he wanted, and he thought about it for a while and then said we’d start small, wouldn’t we, to test. And then he told me to get you to talk about one of the other professors—like Nightingale, for instance. So I did. Better than him asking me to get you to say anything important, I thought, and at least it was easy. Now he just knows what a girl you are when you’ve got a crush.”

I felt cold. Lesley didn’t know who Thomas really was. Of course it had seemed harmless—just my dumb, stupid musings about a guy I had a thing for. But the Faceless Man knew. He’d told Varvara, and they’d come up with that idea to get us to lead them straight to the Chamber of Secrets, so I wasn’t willing to assume there’d been anything casual about that request at all. I tried to think back over the conversation—had I said anything important? It had just been stupid stuff about how confusing he was, right? We hadn’t even been together then, so Faceless shouldn’t even technically know we were dating, though it wouldn’t take a huge intuitive leap.

“How’d that end up going, by the way?” Lesley said.

“Why?” I snapped without thinking. “Your boss tell you to ask?”

There was silence, and then she said evenly, “Okay. We need to talk about this.”

We did. I knew we did. I shook my head anyway, and then, contradicting myself in the next moment, said, “I know, all right? It got explained to me in very simple words. It’s your job. You were doing the right thing. It’s not like you’re actually on the Faceless Man’s side or anything. I get it. I fucking get it. I’m being—” Childish. Unreasonable. Petty. But I didn’t feel childish, unreasonable, or petty. I felt hurt and like my best friend of fourteen goddamn years had sold me out for a paycheck.

“Yeah,” she said brutally. Lesley May, always going for the throat. “You are. God, Peter, get over it. This is bigger than you and me, okay? My _job_ is bigger than you and me. I can’t consider your tender feelings when I’m trying to help imprison a man who regularly tortures and kills people. I can’t believe you even want me to!”

“Tender feelings? Stop making it sound like I’m all pissed you didn’t invite me to the prom!”

“Fine,” she snapped, her foot sliding off the couch and planting itself firmly on the stone floor as she leaned forward. “I lied to you. I tricked you. I had the chance to choose between gaining his trust and protecting you, and I didn’t choose you! Are you happy? Do you feel better? I didn’t want to, and I didn’t enjoy it, but I’m _not fucking sorry._ ”

“I almost _died!_ ” I shouted back. “I almost died, and I’d’ve never let that happen to you, not on my watch, do you get it? I’d’ve told the Faceless Man where he could shove it, but you just got on the phone with me like everything was fucking normal and let me get on with things, and I went on with my day, and I could’ve fucking died—”

“The fuck you could’ve!” She shot to her feet, stalking towards me. “I told him I cared about you, I told him you were important to me, and he promised he’d make sure you came out the other side fine. And that’s when I told him I’d tell you whatever he fucking wanted, not before, so get off your melodramatic high horse, because you were never in any real danger—”

“Varvara shot a Killing Curse directly at my chest! So I think she might’ve missed that memo!”

Lesley froze. “What?”

I felt suddenly drained. I didn’t want to be here, in this room, having this fight with her. Just right now, I didn’t even want to be helping people fight evil. I wanted my terrifying job to be the kind of terrifying I’d expected, where I got to argue with Abigail Kamara and put Zach Palmer in detention for being high around an open flame and congratulate Sahra and Jaget on their very promising futures. I wanted to take a nap and see my parents and go on a date with Thomas and have this whole messy term be over with at last. I scrubbed my hands over my face and didn’t look at Lesley when I said, “We fought. She tried to kill me a couple of times. It’s mostly luck that it didn’t work.”

“Oh,” she said. It was the smallest I’d ever heard her sound, but it didn’t make me feel vindicated. “Peter, I—I swear he told me you’d be all right.”

“If he hadn’t,” I said, “would you have done it anyway?”

She didn’t say anything.

“Did he say anything about anyone else? You knew I was working with Thomas and two teenagers. Did he make any promises about them?”

“Peter, I made a choice,” she said quietly. She lifted one hand, palm up, and then the other. “You and your friends. Wizarding Britain.” She shrugged, dropping them again. “I don’t think I made the wrong one.”

I wouldn’t have done it to her. That’s where I kept getting stuck, somehow: I wouldn’t have done it to her. No numbers, no greater good. Maybe not to anybody, but definitely not to her. “I guess what I don’t get,” I finally told her, “is why you didn’t tip me off somehow in that phone call.” She frowned, drawing in breath to speak, but I shook my head. “Fine, he was listening. I still feel like you could’ve slipped something in. Something he wouldn’t have noticed.”

She hesitated, and I saw her jaw work a couple of times before she sighed. “I thought about it,” she admitted. “I swear I did.  But when we were setting it all up, me and him, he said—he said he knew I was considering it, and that I shouldn’t. That he’d be able to tell. That he knows me well enough that he’d just be able to tell. And I was—” Another pause, as she stared at the blank wall just to the left of my hip. “I was worried that he was right.” She turned and walked back to the couch, settling down against the arm and pulling her knee up again. “The problem with jobs like this is that I’m not undercover as some character, I’m undercover as me. It’s harder to compartmentalize. He does know me, because I’m letting him. I have to.” She met my eyes, and whatever she saw there made her say immediately, “You don’t get it.”

I didn’t, but it still rankled to hear her say so. “Fine,” I said.

“Fine?”

“Yeah, fine,” I repeated. “Let’s just stop talking about this.”

She raised her eyebrows at me judgmentally. “You feel like we’re done here? Really?”

“No,” I said. “But I feel like if we keep going, we’re just going to say the same things over and over and over again, and neither of us are going to change our minds, and what’s the point? You’re not sorry. Are you going to be sorry if I yell at you some more?”

The eyebrows stayed up. “No.”

I tried not to be pissed about that. I wanted her to say I was right. I wanted her think I was right and that she’d fucked up, but apparently I didn’t want that enough to keep standing next to my own door shouting about it. “Right, and I don’t get it. Do you think I’m going to get it if you yell at me some more? Because I don’t.”

“No.”

I shrugged. “So why bother? You’re a bad friend, and I’m a sanctimonious arse with no real-life experience in making any important decisions. There, I just summarized the next half hour of us fighting. At the end of it, we’re not going to have gotten anywhere, and we’re just going to be angrier, so let’s skip it.”

“Why, you have something better to do?” she sniped, but she was starting to smile again. It was tense and small, but it was there. “Honestly, Peter, I’ve haven’t seen you back down from telling someone else you’re right in…oh, ever.”

I let myself walk over to the couch and sit down next to her. “I’ve grown as a person since eleven, Lesley. Besides, eventually you’ll just start saying you’re right all the time and I should shut up, and that gets boring.”

“But true.”

“Fuck off.”

We smiled at each other tentatively, careful of each other in a way we hadn’t been since we’d met on the Hogwarts Express, two Muggleborn first years who wanted to learn magic. I’d never before felt the need to guard myself from her. I hadn’t thought I ever would. I looked at the floor instead of at her beautiful face, scraping the toe of my boot over the flagstones before I realized what an obvious tell that was. I needed more rugs, I thought stupidly, since in December, going barefoot on stone every morning would probably get me a resurgence of the frostbite.

“Hey,” I said, casting around for a subject change that wasn’t about my interior decorating and managing to hit on something I actually did want to ask about, “who the fuck is Awa Shambir, anyway?”

“Actually, about that.” I looked over at her, and she shrugged. “That’s the woman who was the next table over at the pub that one time, right? Dark skin, posh, tall?” When I nodded, she said, “Yeah, I’ve seen her around London a few too many times to be pure coincidence.”

“What?” I said, shocked. “Since when?”

“I don’t know, a while back? It’s been on and off, but I’m fairly certain she’s trying to run surveillance on me.”

I stared at her. “And you didn’t tell me?”

She snorted. “Of course I fucking didn’t, idiot. What would you have done about it, come to London to play bodyguard? Sat here and worried? Yeah, that would have been productive, wouldn’t it. I don’t tell you everything that happens to me at work.”

“No, I know,” I said. “I mean, nice way to put it, thanks, I feel good about myself now, don’t I? But, no, like—why didn’t you give me those probably relevant pieces of information about someone you knew I was suspicious of? That feels kind of important to me.”

“I don’t think she’s working for the Faceless Man,” Lesley said. “I thought at first maybe she was watching me for him, but I’ve sort of changed my mind—I think she’s a lot more likely to be on your team. Amateur investigators. If I’d thought she was properly dangerous to you, I would’ve warned you, honestly.”

“Fine.” I tried to let that make me feel better. I thought it would, eventually. “But knowing she wasn’t would’ve saved me a lot of time and energy and might’ve helped me cotton on to Varvara faster, and then maybe I could’ve done something—”

“Yeah, I was fairly worried about you doing something, actually.”

I stopped. “What?”

“Come on, Peter,” she said, sounding exasperated. “You’re not actually an Auror. Half your methods of working out if someone’s suspicious seem to be ‘talk to them a whole lot and maybe ask.’ If you’d done that to someone actually working for the Faceless Man, I thought they’d probably kill you to shut you up. I figured it was safer if you were concentrating on someone who might not want you dead.”

I stared at her. “Wow, Lesley. Way to have confidence in me.”

“Yeah, your actions haven’t filled me with confidence. You’re fucking awful at this, you know that? I was convinced I was going to be reading your obituary in the newspaper if I let you do anything at all. I was—I made him promise to try and keep you alive for a reason.”

I made a face at her. “I love you too, but what the fuck, come on.” I thought—maybe—I deserved slightly more credit than that. “I got it done, didn’t I? You didn’t tell me things, you set me up, but I got it done anyway. I think I did okay.”

“I’m half-convinced that was blind luck,” she said dryly, “but okay, sure, yeah. You didn’t get yourself or anyone else killed. Congratulations. You’re still not, I don’t know—”

“You?”

“Yeah, for instance. Me.”

“You’re such a nice person,” I said, but I was almost, almost laughing.

She tossed her hair. “I’m a joy, and you’re lucky to have me. Point is: I wouldn’t bother worrying about Awa Shambir. I don’t think you’re the person she’s got it out for, so forget about it unless something changes, okay?” Without waiting for an answer, she got to her feet and walked to the door, pulling out her wand as she went. “I can’t hang around much longer. He’s expecting me back.”

“Yeah, okay,” I said, standing up as well. “No need to make him suspicious.”

She shot me a grin. “Hey, maybe you _are_ getting better at this.” I made a rude gesture without thinking about it, and her smile widened. “Peter,” she said, “are we okay?”

I thought about it. “Not quite,” I said at last. “But we’re going to be.”

She rolled her eyes. “You and your dramatics,” she said, and then she cast a Disillusionment on herself and swanned out the door, getting the last word in neatly. _My_ dramatics, honestly.

#

Thomas showed up at my door a few days after that, a little before dinnertime, knocking and waiting to be let in like he hadn’t spent two out of three nights here (and the others with both of us in his room—I’ve never claimed to take things slow when it’s going well, not that he seemed to mind). I grabbed him and tugged him in for a kiss as soon as the door was closed, just because I could.

“Hey,” I said, smiling at him as soon as our eyes met again. I couldn’t help it. Honeymoon period: looking at him and smiling were basically synonymous.

“Hello.” He was smiling back, and then he slid his hand to the back of my head and tipped me down for another kiss. It was unhurried, and I leaned into it. I liked kissing him like that: no urgency, no goal, just the joy of touching him and having him touch back.

When he finally pulled away and let his hand slip down to rest on my chest, his fingertips on my shoulder, I said, “Is this just a hello-and-kissing visit, or did you have something else in mind?” I nodded to his other hand, which had a bag in it, canvas and practical looking and not the one he usually carried lesson plans and grading in.

“I had something else in mind,” he confirmed. “Did you have dinner plans yet?”

I raised my eyebrows. “Great Hall. Why, am I about to get a better offer?”

“Yes. Are you up for it?”

Gee—a choice between dinner with all my coworkers watching hawkishly over a bunch of teenagers determined to misbehave or a date with my gorgeous boyfriend. That one took me a long time to work out. “Sure, let me just grab my coat.”

“You won’t need it.”

It was December in Scotland, and I practically needed a jacket to look out the window. “Remind me where we’re going?”

“I’ve had an idea.” His smile turned a touch secretive. “I had to use some imagination, but I got there in the end. Coming?”

I was, of course. And I have to admit that it took me an embarrassingly large portion of the walk through the castle halls, up the stairs to the seventh floor, before I realized we were going to the Room of Requirement.

“Someplace to get drunk?” I suggested. “No—you said something about imagination. Thought you said you didn’t have any.”

“I dug some up from the deepest recesses of my mind,” he said dryly. “I thought I ought to, under the circumstances—I wouldn’t want you to get bored.”

Oh, yeah, that was likely with him. “Let me guess: someplace to get drunk and also have sex?”

“Well, I’m certain we could use it for both those things if you really wanted to.”

“Oh, I really want to.” I leered when he sighed at me, over the top and ridiculous, and I didn’t miss the smile he tried to hide by turning his head away.

When he opened the door, though—the appearance of which I missed again, naturally—what I got wasn’t anything like what I’d expected. I’d thought, you know, a nice room, a fireplace, somewhere comfortable to sit. If I were lucky, somewhere comfortable to lie down. I really hadn’t thought he did have an imagination after all.

Instead, I stepped over the threshold into summer.

Into the south of France, or possibly the Caribbean, looking right off the back of a postcard and nothing I ever could’ve dreamt up. Vibrantly turquoise water that I, London boy that I was, had never really believed in as anything other than a film effect, sand so white it looked like snow. I could tell it was going to be soft too, the way no sand ever truly was, but just seeing this stuff, I knew it wasn’t going to be gritty or get in my eyes or burn the bottoms of my feet. There was a soft breeze coming in off the water that smelled faintly clean and salty, the waves rolled gently with a soft _shush-shush-shush_ that reminded me of being gently rocked to sleep—which was especially impressive, considering I couldn’t remember that ever happening. There were a few artistically puffy clouds in the sky, but the rest of it was even bluer than the water. It was warm, too, and so sunny it was like the whole scene was glowing, like the perfect airbrushed photograph of whatever island you’d always dreamed of going to.

“Fuck me,” I said, trying to ignore the little voice telling me that I was getting the sand dirty by standing on it. “We’re in a room in an enclosed castle. That’s a bloody horizon. How far on does this place go?”

“No idea.” I turned to see him smiling at me, looking fond. “I should’ve known that would be what you’d fixate on.”

“Sorry,” I said, though I wasn’t, and I didn’t think he particularly wanted me to be. “Let me try again. This is unbelievably romantic, and you’re amazing.”

His smile widened, showing me his crooked teeth. “Well, I did consider seeing if it could create a secret passage to Paris, but I thought that might be rather a lot of pressure.”

“A little grandiose,” I agreed. “Besides, it would either be a really long walk, or I’d spend the entire time complaining about how the hell this place could bend space like that, and you don’t want to hear about that.”

“Of course I do.”

I looked at his face, open and soft, and I thought he might mean it, which was—I didn’t know what to say to that. “I could do it about the possibility that this room actually extends to the distance we could see instead,” I tried, turning it into a joke. “I already started. I could start yelling and looking things up in books.”

“You could,” he agreed.

“I might get hungry, though, and last I remember, this room doesn’t do food.”

“It doesn’t, but I did think about that.” He turned to a picnic table that had definitely not been there all along, no matter what my brain thought about it, and I frowned. A gust of wind and a shading of my eyes later, there was no table, but there was a blanket, large and gingham and—I was willing to bet—very comfortable. And far easier to get close to someone on.

Thomas gave me a very patient look for that but didn’t actually object. He took the bag he’d been carrying all this time, and started spreading out what I realized was an enormous amount of actual Indian takeout, gotten from a real restaurant, from a real city. The bag itself was apparently bigger on the inside. “You said you were tired of the food from the kitchens here,” he said, straightening up again and not quite looking at me. “In the Hospital Wing. I thought—that is, I wasn’t quite sure what you liked, but curry is generally popular with everyone, and I got a variety.”

“No kidding,” I said, marveling at the sheer volume of food before me. “Where’d you get it?”

“Edinburgh. Easier to Apparate to than London.”

“Yeah.” I looked at him, considering my next words carefully. “You’ve gone to a lot of trouble.”

“I—That is, you—” A flush rose, high on his cheekbones, two bright spots of color revealing how awkward he felt, and I put my hand on his arm. _I want you,_ I thought at him, but any ease with expressing himself tended to fade when the sex ended, so I wasn’t surprised he couldn’t say it. He looked down, where I was touching him, then back up at me, and then he said, very clearly and deliberately, “I would very much like it if this worked. You and me.”

It wasn’t quite the proposal scene from _Love, Actually_ , but on the other hand, having a touching love scene in front of all my friends and family is one of my actual worst nightmares. Instead, there was just us, on the beach he’d dreamed up so I wouldn’t think he had no imagination, next to the food he’d brought for me because I’d mentioned it, with every tense inch of him screaming that he was going to focus all that Hufflepuff persistence on making sure this worked or die trying. Screw touching and romantic—I’d take that over Colin Firth any day. I leaned forward and kissed his lips gently, and he pushed into it with a soft sound of pleasure, one of his hands going to my hip and the other settling on the back of my neck.

“I like you a lot too,” I said once we’d broken apart, and his face broke into a smile so quietly, thoroughly happy I couldn’t believe I had the power to put it there. I felt reckless, impulsive, and untouchable, and I kissed him once more, quickly, feeling the joy in every inch of me, fizzing into my fingers and toes. “And you know what? I really think it’s going to.”

He stepped closer, into the circle of my arms, and I dared the universe to prove me wrong.

**Author's Note:**

> Once upon a time, GreenAwesomeness and I were sitting in a tea shop, and she said, "Hey, you should write Rivers of London fic," and I said, "Damn, you're right, I should, what should I write?" And she decided it would be fun if they taught at Hogwarts, and I went, "Sure, I can make that happen, that'll be, what, 20k? No problem." Which will fucking teach me to estimate word count ever again, won't it. Anyway, a VERY LONG TIME later, here we are, here it is, I have a lot of regrets.
> 
> As ever, infinite thanks to Rose (acommonrose on tumblr, zornslemon on AO3) for the beta. You put up with so much whining, and I'm so sorry. Thanks for forcing me to face my run-on problem. You're my hero, and frankly, you very nearly deserve a co-author credit on this behemoth.
> 
> If you enjoyed the fic, please do let me know in a comment here or on tumblr (where I'm attilarrific)!


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